43 pages • 1 hour read
Ted ConoverNewjack: Guarding Sing Sing
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Performance of Toxic Masculinity
The performance of masculinity factors largely in prisoner and officer interactions. Conover repeatedly questions whether he is tough or strict enough as an officer, which usually results in him being rougher or affirming acts of violence used against inmates. Officer Dieter, Conover’s roommate, is one of the more obvious examples of toxic masculinity; he openly expresses that he fantasizes about hurting and torturing women.
Mama Cradle, who Conover begrudgingly respects as a superior officer, is of course not exempt from being the target of misogyny. Cradle’s nickname among the officers is L.B., or “Little Bitch,” and Conover goes so far as to describe his own attraction to Cradle’s shape. The culture of misogyny is so ingrained that it even factors into the celebration of Mama Cradle’s departure: the male guards make crude, offhanded jokes about Mama Cradle’s body.
Patriarchy seeps into the ways that the inmates are intensely secretive about their attractions to the transgender inmates, or to other men. Grandma, also known as Janice, describes to Conover that other inmates have requested to see her breasts; when she threatens to publicly reveal their desires, they swear her to secrecy. Homosexuality is considered to be an insult and an inmate attempts to solicit Conover for sexual favors. When Conover rejects the inmate’s advances, the prisoner asks Conover not to disclose the request to anyone.
Conover captures the male tendency to engage in toxic masculinity when he writes that:
The character played by Woody Allen in his current film said that whenever he met a woman […] somewhere in his mind he was thinking about having sex with her. My take on it [...] was that most men, meeting other men, instantly asked themselves: Could I beat him in a fight? (247).
In this quote, patriarchy is exemplified both by the manner in which men size each other up and the ways in which men objectify women.
Authoritarianism
Conover illustrates how the sense of morality in prison is often arbitrarily defined by those with the authority to enforce or make exceptions to the rules. One glaring example is the definition of contraband, which, according to Conover, is ultimately up to the discretion of each individual officer. The punishments and responses to inmate disobedience lie in the hands of the officer that they are interacting with at any given moment. There are multiple instances in which Conover is told to deliberately leave out information from his reports, including when Officer X retaliates against a prisoner for the prisoner’s treatment of Officer Y. When Conover specifies in his report that he was ordered by Officer X to punish the inmate, Conover is asked by his superiors to re-write the report and leave out Officer X’s name. Conover observes that “prison was also a microcosm of a totalitarian society, a nearly pure example of the police state” (96).
Cycles of Abuse and Trauma
Over the duration of Conover’s time working at the prison, he gives various examples of how trauma and abuse are replicated and transferred from one relationship to the next. From the training that Conover and his classmates endure at the academy, to the officers’ treatment of the inmates, to Conover’s deteriorating relationship with his family, Conover demonstrates how the impacts of abusive behavior affect every aspect of life within and even outside of the corrections industry.
In the vein of how ‘hurt people hurt people,’ Conover’s training, which is laden with insults and mistreatment, is the first step that hardens him to pain and emotion. Throughout the time of his post at Sing Sing, Conover meets officers who resort to both cruelty and numbness in order to deal with prisoners; conversely, the inmates reciprocate the violent behavior and retaliate towards the guards. Although Conover is advised not to bring his work life into his home and personal life, his mind is unable to set aside Sing Sing. With his patience worn thin, Conover begins to take out his anger on his children and his wife, to the point that he resorts to corporal punishment with his son. Conover writes about how he cannot remember feeling meaner or more vulnerable, and he reflects on the deleterious impact of prison work on the overall well-being of both officers and prisoners.
The Growth and Militarization of the Prison Industrial Complex
From the very beginning, corrections officer recruits are immersed in an environment that is meant to simulate preparation for war: they are exposed to chemical agents, receive weapons training, and are held to stringent physical and mental challenges. The recruits learn that as corrections officers, their job is not to rehabilitate, but actually to warehouse prisoners.
Conover also writes extensively about the unprecedented growth of the prison industry within the United States. From its inception, the intention for Sing Sing was for the prison to be a “moneymaking venture” (184). At the time of Conover’s writing, the U.S. is spending about $35 billion per year on imprisonment. There has been a twenty-percent decrease in the rate of violent crime in the country from 1991 through 1997, and yet the number of people in jail has increased by fifty percent.
