Finding Balance Between Being a Human Being and a Prison Guard at Sing Sing

Tyneshia Wright

Reading Response #4

ENG 08

Lauren Weinbrown

Finding Balance Between Being a Human Being and a Prison Guard at Sing Sing

At the core of Ted Conover's book, Newjack:Guarding Sing Sing is the notion that the prison guard must find a way to balance between aggressive authority and the world of rules put forth by the prison and the prisoners themselves. Through exploring the text and other class readings, I will discuss how Conover had to balance his duty as a corrections officer with that of being "human" or humane.

In his book, Ted Conover is a journalist who spent nine months undercover as a correctional officer at Sing Sing prison in New York State. Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing shares with the readers the experiences of Conover's introduction to correctional work. Before becoming a CO Conover wanted to write a story on the inner workings of the prison but was not permitted into the prison to do his research. That’s when he decided to go to the Albany Training Academy and become a Corrections Officer to find out firsthand what Sing Sing was all about. He says "I wanted to hear the voices one truly never hears, the voices of guards--those on the front lines of our prison policies, the society's proxies."

After training as a corrections officer, he was assigned to Sing Sing in Ossining, where new recruits often spent their first few months on the job. This is also when he becomes partly prisonized; a process through which an individual takes on the values and mores of the penitentiary. Conover finds that he integrates himself into the way things work in the prison according to the law of the land and the unofficial laws of the prison.

He invested the majority of his energy very close with detainees amid his year at Sing Sing. As per John Riley as he would see it of Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, he says "as a newjack, he (Conover) was in charge of the care and authority of scared young first-timers, drug addicts, gang members, violent predators, physically debilitated inmates suffering from diseases like AIDS and TB, and an assortment of "bugs"-- prison slang for the mentally ill." They live in an authorized condition of close defenselessness and reacting to prisoners who required help with an evidently interminable cluster of individual issues filled a lot of Conover's time. (Newjack: Beyond the Stereotype of the Brutal Guard) "An outcome of placing men in cells and controlling their developments is that they can do nothing for themselves. For their different needs they are reliant on one individual, their gallery officer. Rather than feeling like a major, extreme watch, the display officer toward the day's end frequently feels like a server serving a hundred tables or like the mother of a nightmarishly large brood of sullen, dangerous, and demanding children. At the point when developed men are infantilized, most don't take to it too pleasantly." says Conover. He attempted to adjust the guidelines with his own particular feeling of what was worthy; bowing a few principles here and there and maintaining a strategic distance from most detainee's grievances in return, which is a major issue since the unfolding of Prisoner's rights.