Newjack:guarding Sing Sing

AUTHOR'S NOTE This is a work of nonfiction, describing events that I witnessed and participated in. No scenes are imaginary or made up, though some dialogue was, of necessity, re-created. Like all officers, I kept a small spiral notebook in my breast pocket for note-taking; unlike most of them, I took many notes. Most of the individuals in the book are identified by their real names. But to protect the privacy of certain officers and inmates, I have made up the following names for real people: Aragon , Rufino, Van Essen, Antonelli, Hawkins, Gaines, Foster, Wickersham, Perch, Arno, Chilmark, Pacheco, Dobbins, Duncan, Scarff, Bella, St. George, Saline, McCorkle , Birch, Pitkin, Popish, Massey, Lopez, Dieter , Phelan, De Los Santos, Di Carlo, Perlstein, Garces, DiPaols, Billings, Riordan, Speros, Mendez, Delacruz, Malaver, Larson, Perez, Fay, Blaine, Addison, L'Esperance, Sims, Blaine, Michaels, Astacio. CHAPTER 1 INSIDE PASSAGE Six-twenty a.m. and the sun rises over a dark place. Across the Hudson River from Sing Sing prison, on the opposite bank, the hills turn pink; I spot the treeless gap in the ridgeline where, another officer has told me, inmates quarried marble for the first cellblock. Nobody could believe it back in 1826: a work crew of convicts, camping on the riverbank, actually induced to build their own prison. They had been sent down from Auburn, New York State's famous second prison, to construct Sing Sing, its third. How would that feel, building your own prison? That 1826 cellblock still stands, on the other side of the high wall I park against; the prison has continued to grow all around it. In 1984, the roof burned down. At the time, the prison was using the building as a shop to manufacture plastic garbage bags, but as late as 1943, it still housed inmates. Sometimes now when inmates complain about their six-by-nine cells, I tell them how it used to be: two men sharing a three-and-a-half-by-seven-foot cell, one of them probably with TB, no central heating or plumbing, open sewer channels inside, little light. They look unimpressed. I park next to my friend Aragon, of the Bronx, who always puts The Club on his steering wheel; I see it through his tinted glass. This interests me, because, with a wall tower just a few yards away, this has got to be one of the safest places to leave your car in Westchester County. Nobody's going to steal it here. But Aragon is a little lock-crazy: He has screwed a tiny hasp onto his plastic lunch box and hangs a combination lock there, because of the sodas he's lost to pilfering officers, he says. Between the Bronx and prison, a person could grow a bit lock-obsessed. There's no one else around. Most people park in the lots up the hill, nearer the big locker room in the Administration Building. But it's almost impossible for a new officer to get a locker in there, so I park down here by the river and the lower locker room. The light is dim. Gravel crunches under my boots as I head into the abandoned heating plant. This six-story brick structure is one of those piles of slag that give Sing Sing its particular feel. Massive, tan, and almost windowless, it looks like a hangar for a short, fat rocket. The whole thing is sealed off, except for a repair garage around the corner and a part of the first floor containing men's and women's locker rooms and rest rooms. The men's locker room-I've never seen the women's-is itself nearly abandoned; though it's stuffed with a hodgepodge of some two hundred lockers of inmate manufacture, fewer than twenty are actively used. The rest have locks on them, some very ancient indeed, belonging to officers who quit or transferred or died or who knows what. Nobody keeps track. An old wall phone hangs upside down by its wires on the left as you enter, the receiver dangling by its curly cord, a symbol of Sing Sing's chronically broken phone system. Cobwebs,Conover, Ted is the author of 'Newjack:guarding Sing Sing' with ISBN 9780375501777 and ISBN 0375501770.