43 pages • 1 hour read
Ted ConoverNewjack: Guarding Sing Sing
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Life in Mama’s House”
The chapter begins with Conover and other officers looking for inmates with knife cuts on B-block. A rivalry between the Latin Kings and the Bloods has resulted in multiple retaliatory incidents amongst inmates, and the officers believe that an inmate may have recently escaped from a brawl undetected. By the end of the inspection, Conover sees that many of the inmates have scars, but no new wounds.
During a lockdown on B-block, Conover is partnered to work with Officer Bella, who had flunked first-aid during training but eventually passed the exam. Bella, from the Bronx, had had problems in a New Jersey youth detention facility, where inmates had escaped during his watch. He was exonerated when two other employees did not show up for work. Bella is eager to be transferred to the calmer Bedford Hills institution, in order to get away from some of the senior officers at Sing Sing. Bella is enthusiastic during the feeding and cleaning duties, while the inmates are locked in their cells, which amuses Conover.
Conover compares A-block to B-block. In A-block, officers have to navigate Sergeant Wickersham and longer galleries. The lock system, though modernized, is not dependable. There are also more white officers in comparison to B-block.
B-block, which is chosen by Conover as his dedicated assignment, has greater chaos, younger inmates, and more violence. Conover writes:
The real action was on the gallery looking after inmates [...] I thought I could do it. I wanted to do it, to satisfy myself that the toughest job was not beyond my capacity [...] I was always haunted by that mental image of Mendez, the officer who had cracked under the strain of a string of bad days in A-block. (219)
Aside from the action, Conover also enjoys working in B-block because of Mama Cradle, whose nickname is L.B., short for Little Bitch. Conover respects and wants to please Cradle, and he admires her tough demeanor. Although Mama Cradle at first seems to dislike and be frustrated by Conover’s slip-ups, he is assigned to V-Gallery with her more regularly, and another guard guesses that Mama Cradle might be requesting Conover.
One day, after taking over from Officer Sims’s night post, Conover reaches into the desk drawer and finds a bar of soap with a two-inch heart carved into it. Soap carving is a jailhouse art, and Conover wonders about the implications of Officer Sims’s decision to keep a bar of soap that was most likely gifted to her by an inmate.
Conover becomes more aware of the details behind individual inmates’ imprisonment. Inmate Marshall had robbed a bodega with his partner, a policeman, who had killed the store owner. Inmate Astacio, or Buddy, was a porter, who according to Conover couldn’t have weighed more than 100 pounds. Astacio creates custom-made greeting cards for other inmates and trades them for miscellaneous items and packs of cigarettes. Inmate Van Essen, Conover discovers, was in prison for forced sodomy and sexual abuse. Inmate Saenz, who Conover nicknames Medellin, is a Colombian who is always trying to convince Conover to do illicit favors. The inmate nicknames for Conover include: Italiano, Boy George, Huck Finn, Stress Agent, Robocop, Christopher Walken, Ferris Bueller, R2D2, Row Lowe, Three’s Company, Conman, 125th Street, and Barney Fife.
Conover begins to interact with Inmate Larson, in R-29 cell. Larson is black, tall, and slope-shouldered, with long braided hair. Calm and conversational, Larson has many inmate visitors. Larson is the block’s longest term keeplock, with seventeen months completed and three remaining. Nicknamed Powerful, Powwow, and PW, Larson is seen as a father figure for inmates. Larson grew up in Alabama, where he was arrested for assault and then weapons possession. Finally, in New York, Larson was imprisoned for shooting a corrections officer who was also dating Larson’s girlfriend. Larson was sentenced to eight years to life. Larson asks Conover about his past, telling Conover that he should be a teacher. Larson is an autodidact on the subjects of racial theory and blackness. Larson gives Conover hope that the “inmate-officer gap had some chance of being bridged” (230). However, at one point, Larson joins in when other inmates begin jeering at and insulting Conover.
Conover describes how prison construction rates and the number of for-profit prisons is skyrocketing, yet most inmates are non-violent drug offenders. Conover cites experts who believe that decreased rates of violent crime can be attributed to an expanding economy, increased job chances, and a lower male population.
On Mama Cradle’s last day, the officers hold a celebration, bringing chocolate cake and making raunchy jokes. Mama Cradle has requested to be transferred from one of the most challenging positions at Sing Sing to one of the least demanding, at Downstate Correctional Facility. Conover thinks back on the day that Cradle told Conover that he would make a good police officer one day.
Conover approves Inmate W-29’s request to go to the emergency room for an ear problem. The inmate thinks that there is a cockroach stuck in his ear, but the nurse finds only earwax. No older than twenty-one in age, Conover learns that W-29’s father was a CO, that his uncle was a policeman, and his sister is a scientist. W-29 had held up a supermarket the year before. Before Conover makes his way home at the end of the day, W-29 asks where Conover is going. Conover thinks to himself: “God, you poor knucklehead, why didn’t anybody take care of you? Where were your parents?” (241).
Chapter 7 Summary: “My Heart Inside Out”
Conover mistakenly believes that he might be immune to the effects of his work as a correction officer because it is only one part of his life. However, he finds that instead, “I was like my friend who had worked the pumps at a service station [...] Prison got into your skin, or under it. If you stayed long enough, some if it probably seeped into your soul” (242-43). His temper and impatience start entering into his life at home, and Conover draws parallels between his own children and his inmate charges. When Conover plays a game with his young son involving a burglar and a policeman, Conover’s son concludes that both the burglar and the policeman are bad, and is confused when Conover tries to explain otherwise. Later in the evening, Conover’s son wakes up Conover’s sleeping daughter; as a response, Conover spanks his son. Conover acknowledges that there was likely a better way to navigate the situation, but at this point he has no energy remaining. Conover deflects from his behavior as “a way not to examine the fact that I’d never been meaner or more vulnerable” (245).
Margot, Conover’s wife, had at first been supportive of Conover’s decision to take on the project of becoming a corrections officer. However, over time, Conover becomes increasingly on edge: he is unable to engage in his wife’s social circles,which seem so removed from his work within Sing Sing. Because of the risk involved, neither Conover nor his wife reveal his work to their acquaintances. Conover himself is reluctant to share the details with his wife, and instead bottles up the emotions and the stress as his nerves become more and more frayed. Though Conover looks forward to finishing his work as an officer, he is still intrigued by the job and disappointed by his inability to perform his job at a higher level. Conover thinks that he may be too empathetic. For instance, when Conover decides to help an inmate, Beezle, carry laundry, he is criticized and mocked by other officers. A hard-and-fast, yet unwritten, rule was that officers should never help inmates carry their “shit.”
Conover deduces that it takes time and confrontations for officers to decide how they wanted to treat inmates: “The job was full of discretionary power and the decisions about how to use it were often moral” (249).According to Conover, this explains why it takes four to five years in order to become a competent officer.Nonetheless, Conover wants to “achieve as much mastery as I could in the time I had” (250). Conover thus chooses to bid B-block, which means that he will be there daily.
As an escort officer, half of the day is spent in charge of mess hall supervision. The worst job is overseeing the steam table during chow; waffle day is especially difficult, and poses extra challenges, because the inmates love waffles and go to great lengths to obtain extra food. As it is impossible for an officer to constantly monitor where every waffle ends up, inmates often are able to sneak out large amounts of waffles. Conover begins by zealously enforcing the rations but becomes more flexible over time. While working at the steam table, Conover meets Officer Thurston Gaines, a large black officer who seldom needs to raise his voice. When an inmate intentionally splashes juice all over Gaines’s uniform, Conover becomes stricter with the inmates. Officer Gaines tells Conover that upstate, officers purportedly have more power to be abusive and beat inmates for infractions.
Conover has a bit of trouble enforcing the seating rules during chow and learns that some inmates, including an inmate with odor issues, are considered untouchables. Conover describes the prison’s transsexual inmates, including Rivera, Baywatch, Sam, and Grandma. Rivera is considered the most desirable to other inmates and is a “girlfriend” of a member of the Latin Kings gang, while Grandma is disliked and ostracized. Conover enjoys speaking with Grandma, and Grandma explains to Conover that the inmates are vigilant about their sexual desires that may be considered deviant. For instance, an inmate asks Conover if he can perform oral sex on Conover, who refuses. The inmate asks Conover not to tell anyone about his offer, and never looks at Conover again. Conover also explains that masturbation in prison is common, as is consensual sex between inmates and, less frequently, sex between inmates and guards.
V-gallery, which is half the size of R-and-W, allows Conover to catch “more glimpses of the humanity of inmates [...] than anywhere else at Sing Sing” (265). Conover meets an inmate, Perch, who behaves erratically and unpredictably towards Conover; at times, Perch seems not to recognize Conover, and at other times, Perch is belligerent and unruly. Conover writes about the various animals that prisoners capture and domesticate within prison, including birds, a kitten, and a large spider. Conover also weaves multiple complex narratives, commenting on officers’ denial of police brutality and the fabricated versions of the actual events that took place, the in-between place that guards of color finds themselves in, and the inability of inmates to move beyond their circumstances in spite of their desire to change.
On Conover’s last day patrolling R-and-W, he has an especially stressful shift. In the evening, Conover’s relief officer is a new, totally inexperienced recruit. Conover writes, “I could have been a great guy and stuck around to help with the impending chaos. But my head was about to split open. Fuck it, I thought. And in the true, not-my-problem spirit of Sing Sing, I fled” (303).
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
Conover writes that “prison work was an exercise in the massive erosion of distinctions, the lumping together of disparate kids, the suppression of the mind’s ability to perceive difference” (223). This constant practice likewise erodes the capacity or desire for officers to treat inmates in a way that makes transformation or rehabilitation possible. Even the medical personnel directly responsible for the treatment of inmates engage in the tendency to generalize:
Antisocial personality, though it described plenty of guys on R-and-W, seemed also to serve as a catchall for problem inmates who couldn’t otherwise be categorized. That was disheartening, just another suggestion that psychology, admittedly far from curing inmates, even had trouble describing what was wrong with them (223).
When a Department of Parole employee reveals that a mentally-unstable inmate is to be released, Conover is skeptical of the inmate’s ability to navigate the world outside of prison; the employee responds by telling Conover,“‘Don’t worry. They all come back,’” (268). Conover also writes about his interactions with inmate Delacruz, who has an excerpt from Anne Frank’s diary tattooed on himself:
When everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be [...]if only there were no other people in the world (293).
Moreover, in a conversation with Conover, inmate Larson asks Conover to think about why prisons are being planned ten to fifteen years in the future:
Anyone planning a prison they’re not going to build for ten or fifteen years is planning for a child, planning prison for somebody who’s a child right now. So you see? They’ve already given up on that child! They already expect that child to fail. Now why, if you could keep that from happening, if you could send that child to a good school and help his family stay together—if you could do that, why are you spending that money to put him in jail? (233).
Conover offers that although inmates may attempt and desire to better their circumstances, they are not necessarily equipped with resources or support,both during their imprisonment or upon their release from prison.
Conover’s marriage begins to suffer as a result of his inability and refusal to disclose the details of his work to his wife, Margot. Nevertheless, Conover pushes forward with his endeavor. It is interesting to note here that Conover considers his participation and employment as a guard to be a personal challenge, unlike many of his classmates, who are there due to financial hardship and the need to acquire stable employment. Conover admits that he is privileged, as illustrated briefly by his former work, his travel with his father, and the invitation to lecture about his trip to Alaska. This is a stark juxtaposition to his circumstances while working inside the prison. Though Conover’s objective is to learn as much as possible about the world that prison guards navigate, he simultaneously tries to create a distance between himself and his temporary work as an officer. Moreover, Conover’s background is not representative of the officers whom he has admiration for, and who are from similar communities as their inmates and are more easily able to establish a mutual rapport with them. At the end of the day, Conover’s own desire for excellence, perhaps also propelled by the hardline culture of masculinity, is what prevails: “I put the emotions away, and punched in” (245).
