Newjack Guarding Sing Sing Sing: Summary

Ted Conover, a journalist who served as a prison guard for his book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, found that even though pets were prohibited in Sing Sing, the inmates managed to keep animals. One convict kept a cat; another even made a home for a large spider. Pets offered inmates the opportunity to care for something, and the two meanings of "care" are responsibility and love-the key building blocks of rehabilitation.
Prison disconnects people. Sometimes it disconnects prisoners from criminal networks or no-good friends, which is what it's supposed to do. But at least as often, prison disconnects people from the family and community members who would be able to offer them the hope of reconciliation. And if no connections are maintained or forged between prisoners and the
He adopted the persona of a smudge-faced wanderer to feel in his bones and write about the life of a modern-day hobo in Rolling Nowhere. He spent months with illegal aliens on the underground U.S./Mexico border and then wrote Coyotes.
Now Conover takes us into the surreal reality of prison: men warehoused by the hundreds inside cavernous structures whose layered tiers reverberate with a cacophony of clanging keys, slamming doors, shouted orders and taunting responses. A world of simmering violence that can boil over without warning, where the most mundane objects -- a broomstick, shoestring or plastic fork -- are transformed by the desperate into deadly weapons.
Unflinching about what he sees and feels, Conover gets scared and intimidated, but he's not alone. Prison guards are significantly outnumbered by the inmates they're supposed to control. He portrays other guards as guys (and a smattering of women) who mostly do their best to corral their fear and who patch their psychological holes with whatever putty lets them do an unimaginably difficult job. For some, he admits, that putty becomes