Newjack Read Free Page B

Last is the list of “keep-locks.” I copy mine from Cradle’s bulletin board, noting that there are two new ones in the past twenty-four hours. Keeplocks are inmates on disciplinary restriction. In the old days there were few such inmates, and often they would be sent to solitary confinement, known as the Special Housing Unit or the Box. But now their numbers overwhelm the Box, so they stay put, mixed in with the general population—except they can’t come out of their cells. One of our main responsibilities as gallery officers is to keep the keeplocks locked up. Because we’re always in a hurry and often don’t know the inmates, this is harder than it sounds. It’s easy to unlock the wrong door.
    I pass through two more gates on my way upstairs and relieve the night officer on R-and-W. Since the galleries are all locked down at night, mainly her job is to check, every hour or so, that every inmate is still breathing. It’s not a bad job, and if an inmate does die, it’s no problem—unless he’s found with rigor mortis. In that case, she will lose her job, because of the cold, hard proof that she wasn’t really checking. The night officer hands me the radio and some other keys. Does she know what the new keeplocks are in for? I ask.
    “I don’t know, I don’t care, they’re not my friends, and I don’t like them,” she says with a suddenness and finality that I find kind of funny. She hands me the radio, which I attach to my belt. She’s left some wrappers and tissues around the desktop, but I don’tmention it; she looks tired. I envy her as she puts on her coat: She’s going home and doesn’t have to deal with the inmates any longer. “The cells are all deadlocked,” she adds before leaving, which means that not only is the huge bar, or “brake,” in place which locks them all at once but the cells are locked individually. Inmates are not at large at night, swarming around you on their way to chow, arguing with you when it’s time to “lock in,” calling you names, stressing you out. Pandora’s box is closed. My first job of the day, with breakfast less than an hour away, will be to open it.

CHAPTER 2

SCHOOL FOR JAILERS
    When the recruit arrives he is plunged into an alien environment, and is enveloped in the situation 24 hours a day without relief. He is stunned, dazed and frightened. The severity of shock is reflected in 17-hydroxycortico-steroid levels comparable to those in schizophrenic patients in incipient psychosis, which exceed levels in other stressful situations. The recruit receives little, or erroneous, information about what to expect, which tends to maintain his anxiety.
    —Peter G. Bourne, “Some Observations on the
Psychosocial Phenomena Seen in Basic Training,”
Psychiatry
, Vol. 30, No. 2 (1967), 187–196
    W hen the appointment letter from the Department of Correctional Services arrived, Arno had been managing a Burger King in Syracuse. Chavez was working the floor buffer machine in the lobby of a Manhattan apartment building. Davis was pounding fenders at his upstate body shop. Allen and Dimmie were supervising teenage boys in youth detention centers in Westchester. Brown was a plumber in Keeseville, near the Canadian border. Charlebois worked distribution for Wal-Mart in midstate. Others hadn’t had jobs for a while. I had been working for several months on a story for
The New York Times Magazine
. The letter gave each of us two weeks or less to drop these jobs and report to the Albany Training Academy, where we would enter state service as correction-officer recruits.
    I tried to quickly wrap up my work and prepare for the seven weeks away from home—and possibly much more, if I decided to stick with the job and work in a prison. Then, on a rainy Sunday evening in March 1997, I drove from New York City to the Academy. I’d been there twice before, for psychological testing. The three-story brick structure had a white statue in the bell tower and looked like a