Newjack
A Year as a Prison Guard in New York's Most Infamous Maximum Security Jail
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- CHF 14.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
After he was denied access to report on Sing Sing, one of America's most notorious high security jails, journalist Ted Conover applied to become a prison guard. As a rookie officer, or 'newjack', Conover spent a year in the unpredictable, intimidating and often violent world of America's penal system.
Unarmed and outnumbered, prison officers at one of America's toughest maximum security jails supervise 1,800 inmates, most of whom have been convicted of violent felonies: murder, manslaughter, rape. Prisoners conceal makeshift weapons to settle gang rivalries or old grudges, and officers are often attacked or caught in the crossfire. When violence flares up in the galleries or yard an officer's day can go from mundane to terrifying in a heartbeat.
Conover is an acclaimed journalist, known for immersing himself completely in a situation in order to write about it. With remarkable insight, Newjack takes the reader as close to experiencing life in an American prison as any of us would ever want to get. It's a thrillingly told account of how the gruelling world of the prison system brutalizes all who enter it - prison guards and prisoners alike.
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In books like Rolling Nowhere (about hoboes) and Coyotes (about illegal aliens), Conover distinguished himself with brave, empathetic reporting. This riveting book goes further. Stymied by both the union and prison brass in his effort to report on correctional officers, Conover instead applied for a job, and spent nearly a year in the system, mostly at Sing Sing, the storied prison in the New York City suburbs. Fascinated and fearful, the author in training grasps some troubling truths: "we rule with the inmates' consent," says one instructor, while another acknowledges that "rehabilitation is not our job." As a Sing Sing "newjack" (or new guard), Conover learns the folly of going by the book; the best officers recognize "the inevitability of a kind of relationship" with inmates. Whether working the gallery, the mess hall or transportation detail, the job is both a personal and moral challenge: at the isolation unit ("the Box"), Conover begins to write up his first "use of force" incident when a fellow officer waves him away. He steps back to offer a history of the prison, the "hopelessly compromised" work of prison staff and the unspoken idealism he senses in fellow guards. Stressed by his double life and the demands of the job, caught between the warring impulses of anthropological inquiry and "the incuriosity that made the job easier," Conover struggles but nevertheless captures scenes of horror and grace. With its nuanced portraits of officers and inmates, the book never preaches, yet it conveys that we ignore our prisons--an explosive (and expensive) microcosm of race and class tensions--at our collective peril.
