A Guard's-Eye View

What's it like to be a corrections officer? I never really thought about working as a guard (or, for that matter, that I would be reading a book about what it would be like to be a guard). Ted Conover presents a view from the inside in his book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, which he wrote after spending a year as a corrections officer (aka "CO").

Conover first tried to get inside the New York State prison system as a journalist. He was rebuffed by officials but, undaunted, Conover applied for a position and got into the penal system as a guard-trainee (or "newjack," in prison slang). This probably served his writing better than if he had shadowed a guard as an official guest of the state - some of the scenes he details in this book he never would have seen if he was a chaperoned journalist.

Conover takes his readers from CO "boot camp" to his last day as a gallery officer at Sing Sing, a notorious maximum-security prison in upstate New York. Throughout the narratives of the CO training, guards' experiences, and convict/guard interactions, Conover sprinkles in history of the penal system - prisons, wardens, and the various trends in corrections philosophy. The book is guaranteed to horrify you at least at one point or another (or perhaps several times), no matter what your viewpoint regarding prisons. Do you oppose the death penalty? Read about the first few attempts at using "Sparky," the electric chair. Do you think prisoners are coddled? Check out the section about visiting trailers. Do you think guards are unnecessarily abusive? Go to the part where Conover gets clunked in the head. There are plenty of incidents to back up any opinion you may have about guards and prisons - and in most cases plenty of incidents to back up the opposing point of view.

My one complaint about this book is that Conover subscribes to liberal politics. Actually, that's not a problem (I'm a Liberal too), but it becomes a problem when it comes out into his text. Some of his musings on what prison does to the guards and the criminals are great analyses of human psychology, while others serve to push a reform agenda. While I don't disagree with Conover, I found it distracting at times.

Conover's writing is vivid and you feel how he strives to objectively relate life in Sing Sing, giving the CO's and the convicts equal press. But the best part of this book is traveling along in Conover's head as he struggles to reconcile his ethics with the behavior required for being a guard.

Newjack won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist


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Thanx ~ mj