Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
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- ISBN13: 9780375726620
- Condition: New
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Product Description
Acclaimed journalist Ted Conover sets a new standard for bold, in-depth reporting in this first-hand account of life inside the penal system.
When Conover’s request to shadow a recruit at the New York State Corrections Officer College was denied, he chose to apply for a job as a prison officer. So starts his odyssey at Sing Sing, once a model prison but now the state’s most troubled maximum-security facility. The result of his year there is this remarkable look at one of America’s most treacherous prisons, where drugs, gang wars, and sex are rampant, and where the line between violator and violated is regularly unclear. As sobering as it is suspenseful, Newjack is an indispensable contribution to the urgent debate about our country’s criminal justice system, and a consistently fascinating read.
Amazon.com Review
Most people know it’s simpler to get into prison than it is to get out. But for a journalist, just getting into Sing Sing, New York’s notorious maximum-security prison, isn’t simple. In fact, Ted Conover was so blocked by official channels that he took the only way in–additional than crime–and became a New York State corrections officer: “I wanted to hear the voices one truly never hears, the voices of guards–persons on the front lines of our prison policies, the society’s proxies.” Newjack is Conover’s account of nearly a year at ground zero of the criminal justice system. What it reveals is a mix of the obvious and the absurd, with hypocrisies not unexpected considering that the land of the free shares with Russia the honor of having the world’s largest prison population. As of December 1999, it was projected that the number of people incarcerated in the United States would reach 2 million in 2000.
This is the world Conover enters when he, along with additional new recruits, undergoes seven weeks of pseudomilitary preparation at the Albany Training College. Then it’s off to Sing Sing for the daily grind of prison life. Conover correctly and vividly captures the essence of that life, its tedium interspersed with the adrenaline rush of an “incident” and the edge of dread that accompanies every action. He also details how the guards experience their own feelings of confinement, regularly at the hands of the inmates:
A consequence of putting men in cells and controlling their movements is that they can do nearly nothing for themselves. For their various needs they are dependent on one person, their gallery officer. As a replacement for of feeling like a huge, tough guard, the gallery officer at the end of the day regularly feels like a waiter serving a hundred tables or like the mother of a nightmarishly large offspring of sullen, treacherous, and demanding children. When grown men are infantilized, most don’t take to it too nicely.
And not taking to it nicely regularly involves violence. Indeed, the constant potential for violence on any scale makes even humdrum assignments treacherous. It’s astonishing that more doesn’t take place, agreed that the majority of the 1,800 inmates have been convicted of violent felonies: murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, assault, kidnapping, burglary, arson. But beneath the simmering rage rests an unexpected sensitivity that Conover captures brilliantly. After encountering a Hispanic inmate with a tattoo of a heartbreaking passage from The Diary of Anne Frank on his back, he writes: “It was simpler to stay incurious as an officer. Under the inmates’ surface bluster, their cruelty and egocentricity, was nearly permanently something ineffably sad.” Ultimately, the emphasis of Conover’s work is on the toll prison exacts–most immediately on the jailed and their jailers, but also on a society that puts both there in increasing numbers. –Gwen Bloomsburg
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Ted Conover is a rat. What goes on in a correctional institution should stay in a correctional institution. This liberal inmate loving rat broke that fundamental rule.
Plus, he is a sorry journalist.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I was excited when I first bought “Newjack”. I thought that finally a name had written an accurate book about being a Correction Officer.
But what I had establish is that this book was written by a liberal journalist, who likes convicted felons but dislikes and looks down upon Correction Officers . . . opps I mean “guards” as Ted Conover likes to say.
Not surprisingly, the liberal press likes this book and the inmate loving rat leader. They cite his “courage” for going into a prison to get the “real tale”. This isn’t a surprise, though. This self-glamorizing rat is a parrot of the liberal media.
Mr. Conover, us lowly “guards” are sorry that we don’t meet your high standards of human perfection. You are such a model human being, it makes us jealous.
Really, maybe Ted Conover should become Inmate Conover, since he likes inmates/criminals so much. Maybe he should be inmate for a year and write a really excellent book.
Of course, Ted would be the first to want a burglar, who broke into his home to be sent away to prison. Or if one of his beloved inmate followers, hurt a member of his family tree, he would nearly certainly want that person to be severely punished. But no additional victim’s should receive such justice, in Ted’s eyes.
Read this garbage book, only if you want to read the liberal parroting of a rich journalist, who likes criminals and despises law enforcement officers.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Some investigative reporters will do anything for a tale. We see it all the time on T.V. news. This one tends to live dangerously; he wrote about American Illegal Aliens in 1987 — I wish he would do a followup as so much has changed in that regard in the past twenty years or so.
In this book, Ted Conover worked for a yar at the Sing Sing prison (where they held the Rosenbergs back in the ’50s) in upstate New York. Next to Alcatraz out in the ocean off California, this possibly is the most treacherous place to encounter hard criminals. Not that I am adage that the Rosenbergs were criminals; perhaps the spouse was, but Ethel was not — and it was a travesty of justice to take her away from her two sons. I’ve done some research in that case, and I know for a fact that she was not involved, but her brother was. They went to Los Alamos to gather information for the Russians; that made them considered ’spies.’ Ethel never would have been capable of that, just as Alger Hiss was not!
We have a local investigative reporter who goes places for background of articles but he goes where he will be simply an unknown and have a excellent time while he is snooping out the info he needs for a excellent article. He is excellent and improving every year. He might some day catch up to Ted Conover.
He takes such risks in his endeavor to keep the public informed of the terrible side of life. Persons men and women incarcerated, for the most part, committed horendous crimes and will again — even on the guards if possible. Not all are that way. Some are there because they were framed, like Ethel Rosenberg. He went through prison guard training, though from the prison movies I’ve seen they aren’t particularly smart, just mean.
This book was a touch of Hell as they know it and experience it every day. That’s why I am against the death penalty; keeping folks locked up away from the people they like (and despise) is a much worse fate than a quick death.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Conover seems to learn nothing in 1 year on the job. You can’t be running frightened and still be an effective Correctional Officer. No doubt that he didn’t have proper control of the situations or the inmates. Conover seems to focus on the plight of the poor inmates, victims of society. He feels sorry for the inmates. Inmates are in prison because of their choices and behavior. Prison is not the first stop for most inmates. This book gets rather tiring for people who work in the corrections meadow and know what it is really like.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Ted,you betrayed us. How can you,whatever your ‘artistic license” excuse can be,laugh with us,gripe with us,share intimacies with us only to stab us in the back that way you did with this book. After all you alledge you’ve gone through to still refer to us as ‘guards’ and still question our right to carry firearms for protection. Do you really reflect for one sec that we really thought of you as being a ‘excellent’ officer,rather you were regularly referred to as ‘dead weight’. You could never know the inside mechanisms of a right officer’s soul,for you were never one to start with,Ted. In your heart of hearts you know that. Maybe the civilians will eat it up but the ones on the inside know you for what you are…most importantly,you know you for what you are…’nuff said.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5