Newjack is the name given to new correctional officers (COs) assigned as guards to prison facilities: a rookie CO is a "newjack." Ted Conover, renowned journalist, contributing to publications like The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, specializes in books based on immersion journalism (undercover reporting).
Chapter 1 of Newjack, "Inside Passage," orients us to Conover's one-year-long experience as a prison guard by setting the scene. At 6:20 a.m., Conover approaches a work-day at Sing Sing prison situated along the Hudson River in upstate New York. In a digression to a brief history of the prison, he tells us the first cellblock was built of marble quarried nearby by prisoners who would be permanently transferred down from Auburn State Prison to Sing Sing after they completed constructing it. Conover's impression of Sing Sing is that, "Massive, tan, and almost windowless it looks like a hangar for a short, fat rocket."
at first you can't see a single incarcerated soul. All you see are the bars that form the narrow fronts of their cells, extending four stories up and so far into the distance on the left and right that they melt into an illusion of solidity.
He then paints a picture of the men's locker rooms for COs, where uniforms are traded for street clothes to save them from being identified as prison guards in their home neighborhoods. He draws the lower locker room as a symbol for the lives of the correctional officers at Sing Sing: "a hodgepodge of some two hundred lockers of inmate manufacture, fewer than twenty [of which] are actively used. The rest have locks on them, some very ancient indeed, belonging to officers who quit or transferred or died or who knows what."
We walk with Conover through his orientation to a new workday: newjacks are told at the start of each shift by their revolting stomach's just how they feel about their job; personal handguns are checked in before entering the prison and few "have any doubt that prison is the safer for it"; the on-duty officer has a "peek inside [Conover's] lunchbag" checking for contraband; they are given an overview report of "cuttings," attacks, homemade weapons recovered that occurred in between shifts; they are reminded that their job is to "get out of [there] in one piece at three P.M." They are dismissed then to go to their often-changing desk-sergeant-assigned post for the day.
The chapter continues with Conover's walk through the "tunnels" of corridors and stairways, with leaking roofs and rain puddles, to get to the prison cellblocks. He adds in geographical and architectural detail, like the hilliness and the remodel of the former Death House, once holding the electric chair, now a vocational-training building. The tunnels have locked gates at beginning and end, with gate warders holding large old fashioned keys (although the last door, the door into the cellblocks, is electronic). By the time Conover reaches the heavy front door of the cellblocks, he has ten locked gates behind him: "By the time I pass through the heavy front door..., there are ten locked gates between me and freedom."
A large cathedral will inspire awe; a large cellblock, in my experience, will mainly horrify.
Conover ends with information on the structure and functioning of the two cellblocks, A-block and B-block, aligned to each other "end to end," with the mess-hall building in between. The gallery is eighty-eight cells long. As COs pass each cell, they and the prisoners get "a brief but direct look at each other."