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Loading... Newjack: Guarding Sing Singby Ted Conover
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. http://www.steelypips.org/weblog/2003...  knepveu | Jun 9, 2009 |  DeNiro-esque. Ted Conover is one really impressive writer who I kind of see as the Robert DeNiro of writing (note: I mean "Taxi Driver" DeNiro, before he stopped caring and mailing in his roles). I say this because he really throws himself into his books like DeNiro used to do with movies. (again...this is "Raging Bull" DeNiro...not "Rocky & Bullwinkle" DeNiro). Always fascinated with prisons, Conover wanted to write about "The Academy", which is where people in New York learn how to be corrections officers. What he found out is that the New York Department of Corrections would not allow journalists inside to write about them. At this point, any normal person would get frustrated...maybe ask again later...and move on. Not Ted Conover. He decided to BECOME A CORRECTIONS OFFICER. For a year. Not just go through the Academy. He did it for a year. In Sing Sing! Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, is Ted Conover's personal memoir of his year spent as a corrections officer in one of New York's famous maximum security prisons: Sing Sing. If you have any interest at all in prison life, you will find this book to be entirely riveting. Conover holds nothing back as he tries to figure out the life of a corrections officer and the life of an inmate. One point he makes very early is that neither prison nor "prison guards" are very much like the movies. Yes, the movies get some aspects right, like gang violence and the loneliness of being imprisoned. But it doesn't get other things right, like prison rape and brutally violent guards. Of course, there is some of that, and you can't expect Hollywood to portray everything accurately. Conover found prison to be more alive than I expected it would be. I figured it would be routine after routine to keep everything as organized as possible, but there is a lot of fluidity to it. I thought it was particularly interesting that the officers knew that they couldn't control everything and that basically the inmates ran the prison. Kind of counterintuitive. The best parts of the book for me were when Conover would interact with the inmates and how he showed they were real people too. He was very curious about these men: how they got there, how they handled prison, and what kind of people they were. Now, obviously these weren't very good people...since they are in a max prison. But there were a couple of people who you became almost sympathetic to. One particular man had a prison tattoo of an unknown poem on his back. Eventually Conover found out it was an excerpt of The Diary of Anne Frank. After re-reading the book, he realized the similarities between Frank and the inmates and why the prisoner would relate to her. Obviously the situations that surround their respective imprisonments are totally different, and no one intends to say otherwise, but I can certainly understand what the inmate was thinking. I found that story particularly interesting because you don't normally associate hardened criminals as lovers of The Diary of Anne Frank. This book is fantastic and encourages me to read and review some of Conover's other books where he “rides the rails” with hobos, becomes a taxi driver in Aspen, and crosses Mexico's border with illegal immigrants. Look for those sometime in the near future! Rating: 5 out of 5 ------------------------- this review, and others, can be found at www.lettersonpages.com (  ) lettersonpages | Jun 25, 2008 | i really thought it was great firsthand stories (with him being a gurad for a short period) book was good but had parts that dragged but i did enjoy it! (  ) sunking0426 | Jun 15, 2008 | excellent read, informative ( ) hammockqueen | May 27, 2008 | Ted Conover did the ultimate in order to get an accurate story about prison life: he spent a year at Sing Sing himself as an "undercover" prison guard. His eyewitness account and his interesting insights make for thoughtful reading on the subject. (  ) RoxanneMcT | Mar 5, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0375501770, Hardcover)Most people know it's easier to get into prison than it is to get out. But for a journalist, just getting into Sing Sing, New York's notorious maximum-security prison, isn't easy. In fact, Ted Conover was so stymied by official channels that he took the only way in--other than crime--and became a New York State corrections officer: "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." Newjack is Conover's account of nearly a year at ground zero of the criminal justice system. What it reveals is a mix of the obvious and the absurd, with hypocrisies not unexpected considering that the land of the free shares with Russia the distinction of having the world's largest prison population. As of December 1999, it was projected that the number of people incarcerated in the United States would reach 2 million in 2000.This is the world Conover enters when he, along with other new recruits, undergoes seven weeks of pseudomilitary preparation at the Albany Training Academy. Then it's off to Sing Sing for the daily grind of prison life. Conover correctly and vividly captures the essence of that life, its tedium interspersed with the adrenaline rush of an "incident" and the edge of fear that accompanies every action. He also details how the guards experience their own feelings of confinement, often at the hands of the inmates: A consequence of putting men in cells and controlling their movements is that they can do almost nothing for themselves. For their various needs they are dependent on one person, their gallery officer. Instead of feeling like a big, tough guard, the gallery officer at the end of the day often feels like a waiter serving a hundred tables or like the mother of a nightmarishly large brood of sullen, dangerous, and demanding children. When grown men are infantilized, most don't take to it too nicely.And not taking to it nicely often involves violence. Indeed, the constant potential for violence on any scale makes even humdrum assignments dangerous. It's astonishing that more doesn't happen, given that the majority of the 1,800 inmates have been convicted of violent felonies: murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, assault, kidnapping, burglary, arson. But beneath the simmering rage rests an unexpected sensitivity that Conover captures brilliantly. After encountering a Hispanic inmate with a tattoo of a heartbreaking passage from The Diary of Anne Frank on his back, he writes: "It was easier to stay incurious as an officer. Under the inmates' surface bluster, their cruelty and selfishness, was almost always something ineffably sad." Ultimately, the emphasis of Conover's work is on the toll prison exacts--most immediately on the jailed and their jailers, but also on a society that puts both there in increasing numbers. --Gwen Bloomsburg (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:02 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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