Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
Books / Hardcover
Books › Social Science › Criminology
ISBN: 0375501770 / Publisher: Random House, May 2000
The author, a former guard at Sing Sing prison, looks back on his rookie year in the prison as he attempts to balance basic human decency with the rigors of the prison system
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Ted Conover 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 when 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.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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