Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted ConoverMy review
rating: 5 of 5 starsI am finishing up reading a book Tim recommended to me called ‘New Jack.’ The author Ted Conover got a job as a ‘corrections officer’ in Sing Sing to see what it was like to be a prison guard. Seeing as how he looks ‘not tough’ and was used to hanging out with the high society of New York (not the magazine), he comes off pretty whiny sometimes, but it is clear that it is a pretty terrible job, in part due to the stress and psychological requirements necessary to telling people what to do all the time and, in turn, being resented for it.
As we all should know by now, prisons do not do what they were created to do (reform people to act a certain way in society). From the book, one gets the impression that most prison guards (‘corrections officers’) in some way recognize this, but have to act within the rules to maintain their authority or suffer the possibility of violent repercussions (from the people who they are talking down to all day) or being fired. Conover describes this task as one of running a micro-totalitarian state (which includes not letting people shower just any time, not letting people have too many waffles on waffle day, not letting people make elaborate antennas to pick up radio signals, dehumanization, etc.). The sum of this micro-management is alienation of both guards and prisoners.
In this book, and another that I have been reading that is a collection called ‘20th century prison writings’, there is discussion of a reform in the 1910s that took place under T.M. Osborne, who took on this alienation from self-determination. As warden, Osborne spent a week as a prisoner to see what that life was like and from there decided the way to get prisoners to learn to make desirable decisions was not to stop them from making any decisions, but by granting them responsibilities and access to decision-making structures. The movement was somewhat successful, but, of course, looked down upon by ‘tough on crime’ statesmen of the day as being too lax. In the end, the alternative system’s power fell into the hands of gangs and prisoner power brokers, and it was dismantled. The idea was taken up again, however, by a later warden who was a former CO. He critiqued Osborne’s ideas as giving too much responsibility too fast. I guess it was a bit naïve to expect a population, the majority of whom had been told what to do 24 hours a day for many years and were conditioned to get what they wanted through anti-social behavior and alternative political networks (gangs) would be able to transition into a democratic system of power without first becoming subjects of direct democracy. The idea of this conditioning could be similarly applied to non-prison society (learning to defer one’s authority to overseers in school and at work).
All-in-all, the book is really good for people like me who have trouble imagining how and why corrections officers can do their job, or how even some liberal from NYC who believes prisons don’t work and generally walks a middle ground between empathizing with prisoners and sympathizing with guards becomes blood-thirsty in some situations and at times gains sadistic pleasure through the power of micro-management, which is important if we want to speak seriously about prison reform and abolition.
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