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Newjack: A Year as a Prison Guard in New York's Most Infamous Maximum Security Jail Kindle Edition

by Ted Conover (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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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.

Print length

354 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

Ebury Digital
Publication date

30 September 2011
File size

1167 KB
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Product description

Review

[A] mind-blowing example of journalism at its most authentic, Conover discovers that prison can bring out the animal in any man ― Entertainment Weekly

Newjack is about as good as it gets - by turns gripping, funny, frightening and sad ― The Washington Post

Pretty damned amazing...entirely gripping and powerful -- Sherman Alexie

Riveting ― Maxim

Conover is to be commended for having the chops to venture where few others would dare to go ― Los Angeles Times

From the Back Cover

Acclaimed journalist Ted Conover sets a new standard for bold, in-depth reporting in this first-hand account of life inside the penal system.
When Conover's request to shadow a recruit at the New York State Corrections Officer Academy was denied, he decided to apply for a job as a prison officer. So begins his odyssey at Sing Sing, once a model prison but now the state's most troubled maximum-security facility. The result of his year there is this remarkable look at one of America's most dangerous prisons, where drugs, gang wars, and sex are rampant, and where the line between violator and violated is often unclear. As sobering as it is suspenseful, Newjack is an indispensable contribution to the urgent debate about our country's criminal justice system, and a consistently fascinating read.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B005OYF3K4
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ebury Digital (30 September 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1167 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 354 pages

Best Sellers Rank: 633,754 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 143 in Penology (Kindle Store)
- 253 in Penology (Books)
- 267 in Railway Travel

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Maurice Gilliams
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Ted Conover
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Ted Conover is the author of several books including Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's and National Geographic. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University. He lives in New York City.
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Top review from Australia

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Alan M

Long but interesting

Reviewed in Australia on 7 January 2021

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Conover writes very well, his stories of single inmates are fascinating but the beaurocracy of CO employment gets a little long in the tooth but in saying that, it is the premise of the book.

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NotSherlock

Interesting perspective, engagingly told

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 November 2017

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Certainly a very interesting book from a unique perspective. Conover writes about the contemporary state of the prison, while giving us the context of its history and the changes in society and law that govern it. However, his real focus is more immediately human; he frankly shares his (and his colleagues) experiences and frustrations as a corrections officer, while also giving a voice to the inmates as much as he can, given his necessarily restrained relationship with them.

Especially welcome in this this version are two afterword sections, written at seven months and ten years respectively following its original publication, discussing the book’s initial reception and how interest in it has endured.

ruth jelinek

super Lesestoff

Reviewed in Germany on 16 January 2014

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dieses Tatsachenbuch ist so gut geschrieben und so spannend zu lesen, daß sich jeder Thriller dahinter verstecken kann. Ich habe anschließend direkt die anderen Bücher von Ted Conover gekauft

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Brenn

A great public service...

Reviewed in the United States on 3 July 2005

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Walter Cronkite once said that the citizens of a country have a right to know what's being done in their name. It's a simple enough premise: public institutions, spending public money, should be subject to public scrutiny. And yet, the nation's prisons and jails remain practically invisible to the public eye, thanks to both their media-shy temperament and a relatively incurious media. Newspapers and television may flock to chronicle shocking crimes and sensational trials, but when the sentences have been handed down and the headlines are fading, the public mentality seems to be "out of sight, out of mind."

Journalist Ted Conover sought to redress this problem, to understand the corrections system in New York State and, in particular, the corrections officers who, on behalf of the public, guard those deemed unfit for society. Towards that end, he wanted to follow a rookie C.O. through training and into an initial posting, but was repeatedly denied permission to do so. Rebuffed by the powers-that-be, stymied by the system, he settled on an even better and more original solution: to become that rookie C.O. himself.

Many journalists aspire to be (or pretend to be) completely objective--dispassionate chroniclers of the world, separate from the people and situations they write about. The brilliance of Conover's book is that he took a completely opposite tack, enmeshing himself in the system rather than trying to observe it at arm's length. And in doing so, he has created an excellent, compelling, and thoroughly informative book, one that dismantles many stereotypes about prisons and guards, stripping away the lumpy old layers of paint and showing the true shape and color of things.

Many of his most insightful observations deal with a very poorly understood subject--the effects of incarceration on the guards. At the outset of his experiences, Conover wonders whether guards truly are the brutal people depicted so often in prison movies and, if so, whether they are drawn to the work because they are insensitive, mean people or whether they become that way because of the work. By the end of his time guarding Sing Sing, he seems convinced that the latter is often the case, that warehousing people can end up dehumanizing both the people being warehoused and the people doing the warehousing. The stress and strain of prison, it seems, seeps into the lives of C.O.s, resulting in higher rates of alcoholism and divorce. (Those who pick this book up expecting an overly-sensitive, "Cool Hand Luke"-ish rant about cruel C.O.s and maltreated prisoners will find themselves pleasantly surprised by the author's fairness and empathy towards his fellow guards.)

Prison sex, too, appears far differently on the inside than it does in popular culture. While prison rape is a staple of movies and shows about incarceration ("The Shawshank Redemption", "Oz"), Conover concludes that most prison sex is, in fact, consensual. Such observations may seem like voyeurism, but they are not; given the lower availability of condoms, the higher rates of infection for sexually transmitted diseases (particularly HIV) and the fact that many of these men will eventually leave prison (possibly to rejoin thier families), prison sex is a factor that fundamentally alters the incarceration equation.

Despite its overall excellence and its willingness to take on such edgy topics, the book isn't a completely thorough or representative picture of New York State's corrections system. The author readily admits that Sing Sing is an atypical prison, with a larger percentage of minority guards and unseasoned officers than the upstate facilities; it would have been interesting if he'd been willing or able to spend longer in the system and get a better look at those institutions.

Still, this complaint is insignificant when compared with the book's overall virtues. "Newjack" is a great public service, a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the consequences of the nation's get-tough-on-crime mentality. While many people affect a cavalier don't-do-the-crime-if-you-can't-do-the-time air, Conover's book shows that this is a very myopic attitude--prisoners will do the time, and they will emerge, and the experiences they face on the inside will help determine whether they will do the crime again or instead find a place in society. Given that fact, society should try to better understand what life is like for them--and for the guards who do the public's thankless bidding.

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Newjack: A Year as a Prison Guard in New York's Most Infamous Maximum Security Jail Kindle Edition

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