Newjack Read Free

we’re not stepping up to the inmates enough or a caution that we need to watch one another’s backs better and know the names of the people we’re working with or a reminder that our job is “to get out of here in one piece at three P.M. ”—as if that needed saying. No such message today. There’s the schedule of driver’s-ed courses, for anyone interested, and a reminder of next week’s blood drive, and the announcements are over.
    “Officers,
a-ten-shun!”
yells a sergeant. Everyone is quiet. “Posts!” And we’re off, not exactly at a run, through the long, rough corridors and up the hill to begin the day.
    Sing Sing sprawls over fifty-five acres, most of it rocky hillside. It’s flat down where I parked, near the river—the old cellblock and the railroad tracks. The former Death House, site of the electric chair that killed 614 inmates between 1891 and 1963, is down there too. (It’s now a vocational-training building.) And so is Tappan, the medium-security unit of Sing Sing, with some 550 inmates housed in three 1970s-vintage shoe box—shaped buildings.
    But most of Sing Sing is on the hill, and from the lineup room, we climb there. Getting to B-block is the longest walk; it’s the remotest part of the “max” jail. There are a couple of ways to go; both involve a lot of stairs. Officers sip from coffee cups and grip lunch bags as we make the slow march up to work. We are black and white and Latino, male and female. Members of the skeleton night crew pass us in the hall and wave wanly; most have that gray night-shift look. They trade normal diurnal rhythms for the perkof having very little inmate contact—at night, all the inmates are locked in their cells. If I didn’t have a family, I might put in for night duty.
    The corridors and stairways are old, often in disrepair. When it rains, we skirt puddles from leaking roofs. When it’s cold, we have reason to remember that these passages are unheated. The tunnels snake around Sing Sing, joining the various buildings, and at the beginning and end of each—sometimes even in the middle—there is a locked gate. Most of the officers posted to these gates have big, thick keys, but at one gate the guard pushes buttons instead, as they do in modern prisons. By the time I pass through the heavy front door of B-block, there are ten locked gates between me and freedom.
    A-block and B-block are the most impressive buildings in Sing Sing, and in a totally negative sense. A large cathedral will inspire awe; a large cellblock, in my experience, will mainly horrify.
    The size of the buildings catches the first-time visitor by surprise, and that’s largely because there’s no preamble. Instead of approaching them from a wide staircase or through an arched gate, you pass from an enclosed corridor through a pair of solid-metal doors, neither one much bigger than your front door at home. And enter into a stupefying vastness. A-block, probably the largest freestanding cellblock in the world, is 588 feet long, twelve feet shy of the length of two football fields. It houses some 684 inmates, more than the entire population of many prisons. You can hear them—an encompassing, overwhelming cacophony of radios, of heavy gates slamming, of shouts and whistles and running footsteps—but, oddly, at first you can’t see a single incarcerated soul. All you see are the bars that form the narrow fronts of their cells, extending four stories up and so far into the distance on the left and right that they melt into an illusion of solidity. And when you start walking down the gallery, eighty-eight cells long, and begin to make eye contact with inmates, one after another after another, some glaring, some dozing, some sitting bored on the toilet, a sense grows of the human dimensions of this colony. Ahead of you may be a half-dozen small mirrors held through the bars by dark arms; these retract as you draw even, and you and the inmate get a brief but direct look at each