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This is a reprint of my review of Newjack by Ted Conover. This...and other reviews...can be found at Letters on Pages (address in my signature)
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Title: Newjack
Author: Ted Conover
Publisher: Random House (2000)
DeNiro-esque.
Ted Conover is one really impressive writer who I kind of see as the Robert DeNiro of writing (note: I mean "Taxi Driver" DeNiro, before he stopped caring and mailing in his roles). I say this because he really throws himself into his books like DeNiro used to do with movies. (again...this is "Raging Bull" DeNiro...not "Rocky & Bullwinkle" DeNiro). Always fascinated with prisons, Conover wanted to write about "The Academy", which is where people in New York learn how to be corrections officers. What he found out is that the New York Department of Corrections would not allow journalists inside to write about them. At this point, any normal person would get frustrated...maybe ask again later...and move on. Not Ted Conover. He decided to BECOME A CORRECTIONS OFFICER. For a year. Not just go through the Academy. He did it for a year. In Sing Sing!
Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, is Ted Conover's personal memoir of his year spent as a corrections officer in one of New York's famous maximum security prisons: Sing Sing. If you have any interest at all in prison life, you will find this book to be entirely riveting. Conover holds nothing back as he tries to figure out the life of a corrections officer and the life of an inmate.
One point he makes very early is that neither prison nor "prison guards" are very much like the movies. Yes, the movies get some aspects right, like gang violence and the loneliness of being imprisoned. But it doesn't get other things right, like prison rape and brutally violent guards. Of course, there is some of that, and you can't expect Hollywood to portray everything accurately.
Conover found prison to be more alive than I expected it would be. I figured it would be routine after routine to keep everything as organized as possible, but there is a lot of fluidity to it. I thought it was particularly interesting that the officers knew that they couldn't control everything and that basically the inmates ran the prison. Kind of counterintuitive.
The best parts of the book for me were when Conover would interact with the inmates and how he showed they were real people too. He was very curious about these men: how they got there, how they handled prison, and what kind of people they were. Now, obviously these weren't very good people...since they are in a max prison. But there were a couple of people who you became almost sympathetic to. One particular man had a prison tattoo of an unknown poem on his back. Eventually Conover found out it was an excerpt of The Diary of Anne Frank. After re-reading the book, he realized the similarities between Frank and the inmates and why the prisoner would relate to her. Obviously the situations that surround their respective imprisonments are totally different, and no one intends to say otherwise, but I can certainly understand what the inmate was thinking. I found that story particularly interesting because you don't normally associate hardened criminals as lovers of The Diary of Anne Frank.
This book is fantastic and encourages me to read and review some of Conover's other books where he “rides the rails” with hobos, becomes a taxi driver in Aspen, and crosses Mexico's border with illegal immigrants. Look for those sometime in the near future!
Rating: 5 out of 5
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Title: Newjack
Author: Ted Conover
Publisher: Random House (2000)
DeNiro-esque.
Ted Conover is one really impressive writer who I kind of see as the Robert DeNiro of writing (note: I mean "Taxi Driver" DeNiro, before he stopped caring and mailing in his roles). I say this because he really throws himself into his books like DeNiro used to do with movies. (again...this is "Raging Bull" DeNiro...not "Rocky & Bullwinkle" DeNiro). Always fascinated with prisons, Conover wanted to write about "The Academy", which is where people in New York learn how to be corrections officers. What he found out is that the New York Department of Corrections would not allow journalists inside to write about them. At this point, any normal person would get frustrated...maybe ask again later...and move on. Not Ted Conover. He decided to BECOME A CORRECTIONS OFFICER. For a year. Not just go through the Academy. He did it for a year. In Sing Sing!
Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, is Ted Conover's personal memoir of his year spent as a corrections officer in one of New York's famous maximum security prisons: Sing Sing. If you have any interest at all in prison life, you will find this book to be entirely riveting. Conover holds nothing back as he tries to figure out the life of a corrections officer and the life of an inmate.
One point he makes very early is that neither prison nor "prison guards" are very much like the movies. Yes, the movies get some aspects right, like gang violence and the loneliness of being imprisoned. But it doesn't get other things right, like prison rape and brutally violent guards. Of course, there is some of that, and you can't expect Hollywood to portray everything accurately.
Conover found prison to be more alive than I expected it would be. I figured it would be routine after routine to keep everything as organized as possible, but there is a lot of fluidity to it. I thought it was particularly interesting that the officers knew that they couldn't control everything and that basically the inmates ran the prison. Kind of counterintuitive.
The best parts of the book for me were when Conover would interact with the inmates and how he showed they were real people too. He was very curious about these men: how they got there, how they handled prison, and what kind of people they were. Now, obviously these weren't very good people...since they are in a max prison. But there were a couple of people who you became almost sympathetic to. One particular man had a prison tattoo of an unknown poem on his back. Eventually Conover found out it was an excerpt of The Diary of Anne Frank. After re-reading the book, he realized the similarities between Frank and the inmates and why the prisoner would relate to her. Obviously the situations that surround their respective imprisonments are totally different, and no one intends to say otherwise, but I can certainly understand what the inmate was thinking. I found that story particularly interesting because you don't normally associate hardened criminals as lovers of The Diary of Anne Frank.
This book is fantastic and encourages me to read and review some of Conover's other books where he “rides the rails” with hobos, becomes a taxi driver in Aspen, and crosses Mexico's border with illegal immigrants. Look for those sometime in the near future!
Rating: 5 out of 5