have arrested them.
“And inmates don’t run this place—officers do. You will see that with your own eyes on Wednesday.
“And as far as following the rules … we are not an upstate prison. We try to follow them to the letter, and we will expect you to. The new administration is committed to tightening security at this prison. But we are a training facility, and not everything is exactly the way we’d like it to be.”
“Training facility” was not an official designation, the superintendent would later explain; it was just the way things had worked out. New recruits came here to answer the chronic shortage of officers, and they had to be trained. Five thousand had started out at Sing Sing since 1988, sixteen hundred of them in 1996 alone. The department had an unprecedented need for new officers right now, apparently due to higher-than-usual rates of retirement and attrition.
A training officer named Hill told us that our job would be unusually difficult, because “OJTs irritate inmates.” Inmates appreciate a constant set of keepers, he explained; they don’t like having the rules enforced differently every day. Not that it was necessarily a snap being an old-timer, either; one longtime employee had had his nose broken during a scuffle in the yard just the previous weekend. Sing Sing had between 700 and 750 “security employees” at a given time; 34 percent of these officers had less than a year on the job.
We broke for lunch, and afterward, we were each issued a baton. Down the row from me, someone noticed that his had dried blood on it. Next, we lined up to have our pictures taken. First, we faced the camera while holding up a little piece of paper displaying our name and Social Security number and the date, and then we turned for a profile shot—just as if we were inmates being processed at a jail. These were “hostage photos,” one trainer told me, for our permanent files, to be released to the press if something happened to us—such as being taken hostage. I laughed, thinking the man had a dark sense of humor. But he was unsmiling and, Islowly realized, serious. As unsettling to me as the photos’ purpose was the fact that they weren’t called something else—say, employee contingency portraits, or some other euphemism. Calling them hostage photos was like saying we were “guards” in a “prison.”
In the afternoon, we learned more about the inmates. Sing Sing is the second-oldest (after Auburn) and second-largest (after Clinton) prison in the state, and at this time it had 1,813 inmates in the maximum-security prison and 556 in Tappan, the medium-security portion. Of the total—2,369—1,726 were violent felons; 672 had been convicted of murder or manslaughter. In other words, between a quarter and a third of the inmates had killed somebody. Other violent felons had committed rape (93) or sodomy (38) or a variety of crimes including robbery, assault, kidnapping, burglary, and arson. Eighty percent were from the New York City area. Forty-three percent were ages 25 to 34. African Americans made up 56 percent of the inmate population, Hispanics comprised another 32 percent, and whites around 10 percent.
Sing Sing is unusual for a large max in that it has few vocational or other programs for inmates. Inmates are still required to work for their GEDs, but almost all college-level programs ceased in 1994 and 1995, when state and federal lawmakers ended the funding. “Now there isn’t much to take away,” the programs director admitted candidly during his brief presentation after lunch. “We’re pretty much down to the bare minimum. We have trouble finding things for all the inmates to do—there are only programs for three or four hundred men.” The gap was filled with recreation: unstructured time in the yard or gym. Up to sixteen hundred men might be in recreation at a given time.
The superintendent had less than a year on the job, too. Charles Greiner, who was fit, white-haired, and
“And inmates don’t run this place—officers do. You will see that with your own eyes on Wednesday.
“And as far as following the rules … we are not an upstate prison. We try to follow them to the letter, and we will expect you to. The new administration is committed to tightening security at this prison. But we are a training facility, and not everything is exactly the way we’d like it to be.”
“Training facility” was not an official designation, the superintendent would later explain; it was just the way things had worked out. New recruits came here to answer the chronic shortage of officers, and they had to be trained. Five thousand had started out at Sing Sing since 1988, sixteen hundred of them in 1996 alone. The department had an unprecedented need for new officers right now, apparently due to higher-than-usual rates of retirement and attrition.
A training officer named Hill told us that our job would be unusually difficult, because “OJTs irritate inmates.” Inmates appreciate a constant set of keepers, he explained; they don’t like having the rules enforced differently every day. Not that it was necessarily a snap being an old-timer, either; one longtime employee had had his nose broken during a scuffle in the yard just the previous weekend. Sing Sing had between 700 and 750 “security employees” at a given time; 34 percent of these officers had less than a year on the job.
We broke for lunch, and afterward, we were each issued a baton. Down the row from me, someone noticed that his had dried blood on it. Next, we lined up to have our pictures taken. First, we faced the camera while holding up a little piece of paper displaying our name and Social Security number and the date, and then we turned for a profile shot—just as if we were inmates being processed at a jail. These were “hostage photos,” one trainer told me, for our permanent files, to be released to the press if something happened to us—such as being taken hostage. I laughed, thinking the man had a dark sense of humor. But he was unsmiling and, Islowly realized, serious. As unsettling to me as the photos’ purpose was the fact that they weren’t called something else—say, employee contingency portraits, or some other euphemism. Calling them hostage photos was like saying we were “guards” in a “prison.”
In the afternoon, we learned more about the inmates. Sing Sing is the second-oldest (after Auburn) and second-largest (after Clinton) prison in the state, and at this time it had 1,813 inmates in the maximum-security prison and 556 in Tappan, the medium-security portion. Of the total—2,369—1,726 were violent felons; 672 had been convicted of murder or manslaughter. In other words, between a quarter and a third of the inmates had killed somebody. Other violent felons had committed rape (93) or sodomy (38) or a variety of crimes including robbery, assault, kidnapping, burglary, and arson. Eighty percent were from the New York City area. Forty-three percent were ages 25 to 34. African Americans made up 56 percent of the inmate population, Hispanics comprised another 32 percent, and whites around 10 percent.
Sing Sing is unusual for a large max in that it has few vocational or other programs for inmates. Inmates are still required to work for their GEDs, but almost all college-level programs ceased in 1994 and 1995, when state and federal lawmakers ended the funding. “Now there isn’t much to take away,” the programs director admitted candidly during his brief presentation after lunch. “We’re pretty much down to the bare minimum. We have trouble finding things for all the inmates to do—there are only programs for three or four hundred men.” The gap was filled with recreation: unstructured time in the yard or gym. Up to sixteen hundred men might be in recreation at a given time.
The superintendent had less than a year on the job, too. Charles Greiner, who was fit, white-haired, and
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