Conover - Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing

Acclaim for Ted Conovers

Nobody goes to greater lengths to get a story than Ted Conover. Immersing himself in his subject to a degree matched by few journalists working today, he has given us a compelling, compassionate look at a terribly important, poorly understood aspect of American society. My hat is off to him.

Jon Krakauer

Newjack tells the straight skinny on a guards life inside prison without being overly judgmental or cloyingly sentimental. Its experiential journalism at its best.

The Denver Post

Ted Conover is a first-rate reporter and more daring and imaginative than the rest of us combined. This book is one of his finest.

Sebastian Junger

Profoundly eye-opening.

Chicago Sun-Times

A devastating chronicle of the toll prison takes on the prisoners and the keepers of the keys.

Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

This book takes a reader inside one of the many locked doors of Americas penal system. It is clear-eyed and sympathetic, intelligent and engrossing. It reminded me of some of George Orwells admirable journalism.

Tracy Kidder

A fascinating and sobering read.

USA Today

It is hard to know if there has ever been an institution that cost more and achieved less than a prison. And after reading Newjack, that statement seems truer than ever.

Chicago Tribune

An incisive and indelible look at the life of a corrections officer and the dark life of the penal system.

The Dallas Morning News

Endlessly fascinating, often suspenseful.

The Christian Science Monitor

Pretty damned amazing . entirely gripping and powerful.

Sherman Alexie

A fascinating story . Prison books crowd the shelves, but few tell the story from the point of view of the officers who spend eight hours a day doing time, hoping and praying that they make it home that night, hoping and praying that the job allows them to remain human.

The San Diego Union-Tribune

Newjack is a valuable contribution to the urgent debate about crime and punishment in our time.

The Boston Globe

A fascinating window into the complex machinations of Americas prison systems.

The Austin Chronicle

A timely, troubling, important book.

The Baltimore Sun

George Orwell, you have a godson. Upton Sinclair, youve been one-upped. In this mind-blowing example of journalism at its most authentic, Conover discovers that prison can bring out the animal in any man, and even the zookeeper has to protect his soul.

Entertainment Weekly

Ted Conover
NEWJACK

Ted Conover was raised in Colorado and lives in New York City. Two of his previous books, White-out and Coyotes, were named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. Further information about Ted Conover is available on his web site at www.tedconover.com.

ALSO BY TED CONOVER

Whiteout: Lost in Aspen

Coyotes: A Journey Through the Secret World of
Americas Illegal Aliens

Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails
with Americas Hoboes

TO MARGOT
sweet muse, sharp-eyed critic,
my girl on the train

Thanks to Kathy R., agent nonpareil; to Dan M., early believer; to Nicky D., Bob R., and Estelle G., good readers, advisers, and secret keepers all; to Robert S., Esq., for advice; to Jerry C., Jody and Jenni K., David S., Katie C., and especially, as ever, thanks, Jay.

S ix-twenty A.M. and the sun rises over a dark place. Across the Hudson River from Sing Sing prison, on the opposite bank, the hills turn pink; I spot the treeless gap in the ridgeline where, another officer has told me, inmates quarried marble for the first cell-block. Nobody could believe it back in 1826: a work crew of convicts, camping on the riverbank, actually induced to build their own prison. They had been sent down from Auburn, New York States famous second prison, to construct Sing Sing, its third. How would that feel, building your own prison?

The shell of that 1826 cellblock still stands, on the other side of the high wall I park against; the prison has continued to grow all around it. In 1984, the roof burned down. At the time, the prison was using the building as a shop to manufacture plastic garbage bags, but as late as 1943, it still housed inmates. Sometimes now when inmates complain about their six-by-nine cells, I tell them how it used to be: two men sharing a three-and-a-half-by-seven-foot cell, one of them probably with TB, no central heating or plumbing, open sewer channels inside, little light. They look unimpressed.

I park next to my friend Aragon, of the Bronx, who always puts The Club on his steering wheel; I see it through his tinted glass. This interests me, because, with a heavily armed wall tower just a few yards away, this has got to be one of the safest places to leave your car in Westchester County. Nobodys going to steal it here. But Aragon is a little lock-crazy: He has screwed a tiny hasp onto his plastic lunch box and hangs a combination lock there, because of the sodas hes lost to pilfering officers, he says. Between the Bronx and prison, a person could grow a bit lock-obsessed.