| Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing |  | Author: Ted Conover
Publisher: Topeka Bindery
Category: Book
Buy New: $23.70
New (1) Used (1) from $23.70
Avg. Customer Rating:  103 reviews
Sales Rank: 3519262
Media: School & Library Binding
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 1417626089
Dewey Decimal Number: 365.92
EAN: 9781417626083
ASIN: 1417626089
Publication Date: June 12, 2001
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Amazon.com Review
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
Product Description
Ted Conover, the intrepid author of Coyotes, about the world of illegal Mexican immigrants, spent a year as a prison guard at Sing Sing. Newjack, his account of that experience, is a milestone in American journalism: a book that casts new and unexpected light on this nation's prison crisis and sets a new standard for courageous, in-depth reporting.
At the infamous Sing Sing, once a model prison but now New York State's most troubled maximum-security facility, Conover goes to work as a gallery officer, working shifts in which he alone must supervise scores of violent inner-city felons. He soon learns the impossibility of doing his job by the book. What should he do when he feels the hair-raising tingle that tells him a fight is about to break out? When he loses a key in a tussle? When a prisoner punches him in the head? Little by little, he learns to walk the fine line between leniency and tyranny that distinguishes a good guard.
Along the way, we meet a cast of characters that includes a tough but appealing supervisor named Mama Cradle; a range of mentally ill prisoners, or "bugs"; some of the jail's more flamboyant transvestites; and a philosophical, charismatic inmate who points out to Conover that the United States is building new prisons for future felons who are now only four and five years old. Conover also gives us a history of Sing Sing (it was built by inmates, and for decades was the nation's capital of capital punishment) in a chapter that serves as a brilliant short course in America's penal system.
With empathy and insight, Newjack tells the story of a harsh, hidden world and dramatizes the conflict between the necessity to isolate criminals and the dehumanization—of guards as well as inmates—that almost inevitably takes place behind bars.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 98 more reviews...
 An eye opening, socially relevant work. July 21, 2008
It has been said that good writers must suffer for their craft. But few would have voluntarily gone to the lengths Ted Conover went to in order to gather information for this important, informative book. Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing chronicles the author's experiences as he worked incognito for a year as a rookie corrections officer at world famous Sing Sing, one of New York State's maximum security prisons.
Conover calmly tells it like it is in the little seen but ever expanding world of corrections. He describes the soul sapping indignities that officers and inmates alike contend with on a day to day basis, bringing to life a hidden world that few outsiders will ever see or even want to think about.
For an informed, nonsensationalistic look at modern day prisons and the men and women who guard them, Newjack by Ted Conover is without equal. Highly recommended.
 NewJack February 23, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Average prose, a real cure for insomnia with some interestging tidbits. It's a book I now own that will forever collect dust.
An Engaging Narrative and a Classic on Our Failed Prison System January 29, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Awarded a 2001 National Book Award and selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Newjack Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing has become a sociological classic, a gritty, eyewitness account of the escalating tragedy afflicting the American penal system. As a journalist-turned undercover prison guard, Conover demonstrates the sweeping irony of a prison system that has engulfed certain minorities on such a massive scale that prison culture has influenced popular culture through trappings such as baggy, beltless, low-slung pants or laceless sneakers, all with a pervasiveness that reflects a dark reality: "Prison has unwittingly given rise to its own empowering culture," observes Conover, "...one that keeps inmates resentful and resistant to incarceration's `reformative' goals...."
The failure of prison to reform its inmates not only fails the incarcerated, observes the author in this hard-hitting narrative, but our entire society, which pays millions of dollars each year to warehouse dysfunctional human beings and must face the broken families they leave behind, in a vicious cycle that expands exponentially with each new generation.
A string of powerful and insightful anecdotes portraying the wastefulness of inmate life and the struggle of both guards and prisoners to maintain their humanity in an inhuman environment buttresses the author's point: Investing in preventative measures to strengthen families and communities would reduce childhood trauma, provide hope, and avert the far higher societal and financial costs of rampant violent crime. In sum, Newjack offers a suspenseful, cinema noir style that engages the reader while conveying a bleak, cautionary vision, one that we ignore at our own peril.
Nothing New July 11, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
While on the surface, the idea of Conover immersing himself into the NY maximum security prison system as a corrections officer (CO) seemed to be a recipe for an exciting book, Newjack did not live up to its hype. Somewhere in the book it was mentioned that to become a mature CO, 4-5 years of work experience is necessary. Consequently, the one year Conover spent in New York's Sing Sing maximum security prison was hardly enough time to learn and build the kind of relationships necessary for a thoughtful and entertaining book. Instead, the parts of the book I found to be the most interesting were the historical accounts of who had the most influence in how the U.S. and NY prison systems evolved.
Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of new ground covered through Conover's personal experience during guard training or in Sing Sing. The old clichés of prison guards as mean SOBs and apathetic prisoners beyond rehabilitation were reinforced.
I commend Conover's dedication to compiling material from firsthand experience, but Newjack was mildly entertaining and even less educational in terms of observations of inmate behavior, or new ideas in improving the system. Newjack would have had richer content had Mr. Conover been allowed to shadow an experienced CO as he set out to do initally, but was denied.
Conover's Best May 21, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Chameleon journalist Ted Conover trains as a prison guard and works in Sing Sing, giving readers an intense look into prison life and the dynamics of the guards and guarded.
Intense, intensely personal, and full of insight into the prison system itself.
Best part is his history of the US penitentiary system, which most of us don't study in US History classes! Highly readable, well-researched section that should be of interest to all US citizens.
An incredible journey, a well-written account.
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