CO’s own baton or punched him in the mouth—the versions varied. He was badly hurt over a cigarette.
The story had stuck because the lesson was vague. Apparently, it wasn’t a good idea to pull a cigarette out of an inmate’s mouth. I suppose I already knew that. But what were you to do in such a situation? Write the inmate a ticket for disobeying a direct order? Walk away and lose face? In how many ways would my authority be challenged inside the prison? And how would I react when it was?
Given wrong directions at the Academy, I parked at one end of the top wall, as far as I could possibly be from the corner of the prison where I was due to report. It took fifteen minutes to hustle down a crumbling cement staircase lined with a rusty railing to the main gate and then down more steps, over the railroad tracks to the flat terrain by the river. Outside the prison walls, just a few feet from the Hudson River, are three low, white buildings that contrast with the rest of Sing Sing in their newness and cheap construction. Two are small prefab bunk rooms for officers and sergeants. The third is the Quality of Working Life building, orQWL, a conference room with sliding glass doors and a wooden deck used for training, meetings, and parties.
Here began the four weeks of on-the-job-training (OJT) that would qualify us to become regular officers (though, technically, we would continue on probation for a full year). I was nervous but excited: Sing Sing, storied and mysterious, was exactly where I wanted to be. And I was glad to be living at home again. For most of my classmates, however, Sing Sing was even farther from home than was Albany. Expecting postings in the lower Hudson Valley, my classmates had begun looking before graduation for cheap, small apartments they could share. Davis, DiPaola, and Charlebois had found one in a bad neighborhood in Newburgh, about an hour north of Sing Sing. Arno, Emminger, Falcone, and some others had found a rooming house—“really, it’s more like a halfway house, with recovering addicts and all,” Arno said—around Beacon. Dieter was staying with Di Carlo and his family. Others moved into the few spaces available at Harlem Valley, a former state mental hospital about forty-five minutes from Sing Sing that was now used to house correction officers. A year before at this former asylum, a drunken CO had shot and killed his girlfriend, also a CO, and a female roommate, over unrequited love. But at twenty dollars a week, the price was right.
We were told to set up enough folding chairs and tables to accommodate the 111 people who remained of our class in four or five long rows. There was a lectern at the front of the room; rest rooms and a kitchen were off to the side. Wearing the same dress-blues uniforms we had graduated in the Friday before, we stood at our tables and snapped to attention when the training lieutenant, Wilkin, entered the room.
Wilkin, a laid-back guy, told us all to take a seat, put our brimmed “bus driver” hats on the table in front of us, and just talk to him for a while. Rumors about Sing Sing abounded at the Academy, he knew. “What have you heard?”
It took a while for anyone to raise a hand.
“That officers here sell drugs,” someone finally ventured.
“Uh-huh,” said Wilkin. “What else?”
“That it’s totally crazy and chaotic,” said someone else. “That inmates run the place, and nobody follows the rules.”
“Mm,” said Wilkin. “What else?”
“That some of the officers are real buddy-buddy with the inmates,” said one of the Antonellis, seeming emboldened. “Andthat they won’t always cover your back.” It was black officers I’d heard thus disparaged at the Academy, but Antonelli left that out.
Instead of laughing, shaking his head, and denying all this, Wilkin, to my surprise, was circumspect. “No officers, to my knowledge, are selling drugs,” he said. “When they have been in the past and we have learned of that, we
The story had stuck because the lesson was vague. Apparently, it wasn’t a good idea to pull a cigarette out of an inmate’s mouth. I suppose I already knew that. But what were you to do in such a situation? Write the inmate a ticket for disobeying a direct order? Walk away and lose face? In how many ways would my authority be challenged inside the prison? And how would I react when it was?
Given wrong directions at the Academy, I parked at one end of the top wall, as far as I could possibly be from the corner of the prison where I was due to report. It took fifteen minutes to hustle down a crumbling cement staircase lined with a rusty railing to the main gate and then down more steps, over the railroad tracks to the flat terrain by the river. Outside the prison walls, just a few feet from the Hudson River, are three low, white buildings that contrast with the rest of Sing Sing in their newness and cheap construction. Two are small prefab bunk rooms for officers and sergeants. The third is the Quality of Working Life building, orQWL, a conference room with sliding glass doors and a wooden deck used for training, meetings, and parties.
Here began the four weeks of on-the-job-training (OJT) that would qualify us to become regular officers (though, technically, we would continue on probation for a full year). I was nervous but excited: Sing Sing, storied and mysterious, was exactly where I wanted to be. And I was glad to be living at home again. For most of my classmates, however, Sing Sing was even farther from home than was Albany. Expecting postings in the lower Hudson Valley, my classmates had begun looking before graduation for cheap, small apartments they could share. Davis, DiPaola, and Charlebois had found one in a bad neighborhood in Newburgh, about an hour north of Sing Sing. Arno, Emminger, Falcone, and some others had found a rooming house—“really, it’s more like a halfway house, with recovering addicts and all,” Arno said—around Beacon. Dieter was staying with Di Carlo and his family. Others moved into the few spaces available at Harlem Valley, a former state mental hospital about forty-five minutes from Sing Sing that was now used to house correction officers. A year before at this former asylum, a drunken CO had shot and killed his girlfriend, also a CO, and a female roommate, over unrequited love. But at twenty dollars a week, the price was right.
We were told to set up enough folding chairs and tables to accommodate the 111 people who remained of our class in four or five long rows. There was a lectern at the front of the room; rest rooms and a kitchen were off to the side. Wearing the same dress-blues uniforms we had graduated in the Friday before, we stood at our tables and snapped to attention when the training lieutenant, Wilkin, entered the room.
Wilkin, a laid-back guy, told us all to take a seat, put our brimmed “bus driver” hats on the table in front of us, and just talk to him for a while. Rumors about Sing Sing abounded at the Academy, he knew. “What have you heard?”
It took a while for anyone to raise a hand.
“That officers here sell drugs,” someone finally ventured.
“Uh-huh,” said Wilkin. “What else?”
“That it’s totally crazy and chaotic,” said someone else. “That inmates run the place, and nobody follows the rules.”
“Mm,” said Wilkin. “What else?”
“That some of the officers are real buddy-buddy with the inmates,” said one of the Antonellis, seeming emboldened. “Andthat they won’t always cover your back.” It was black officers I’d heard thus disparaged at the Academy, but Antonelli left that out.
Instead of laughing, shaking his head, and denying all this, Wilkin, to my surprise, was circumspect. “No officers, to my knowledge, are selling drugs,” he said. “When they have been in the past and we have learned of that, we
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