The book NewJack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover is an profound book to read it gave me a great glimpse of how the prison life really is and how you can put yourself in comparing how Hollywood movies or TV shows displays them. Conover discuss about the history of Sing Sing prison since 1826. It was an authentic and straight forward of how the prison life is especially for those who want to pursue as a correctional officers. It gave two perspectives one from the guards and the other by the inmates. It shows a psychological effects of violence between the guards and inmates within the cell walls also it gave the transformation life in training and life with inmates. What surprise me in the book it only took the recruiters seven weeks training camp during those week they had to “write the use of force, from penal law to “standard of inmates behavior”… there would be tests every Friday, on which we had to score 70 percent or better. We’d have two hours of physical performance test in out last week. We’d learn how to use batons and how to fight hand to hand in a course called Defensive Tactics. We’d have to qualify on a shooting range. Finally, we’d be exposed to tear gas and learn how to fire gas guns (p.23).” The training camp was very similar to a military boot camp. After the seven weeks of training they all went straight to prison work during prison they had to deal with the hardship, stress and chaos surrounding the job of officers and what they go through during
The Red tent is a book that follows the life of a woman named Dinah. The stories that are told throughout take place in biblical times, and follows some of the lineage of the bible itself. The book begins by telling the story of Dinah’s four mothers, along with their relationship with Dinah’s father Jacob. After being introduced to Dinah herself, the book follows her life story from beginning to end, all the way from Haran, through Canaan, Shechem, and into Egypt. Throughout this paper, I will be describing and comparing events of the book verses modern day, in relationship to child birthing practices, family dynamics, personal life experiences of characters, along with discussing herbs, spices, and medications used by
We all make mistakes that we later regret, but that's life. We need to focus more on just accepting to live with it.
Inmates at Shawshank were often beat within an inch of their lives by the administration at Shawshank in order to instill a sense of obedience and to keep enforcing routine. Head Guard Captain Hadley would on occasion hurt the prisoners so much they would die of injury’s they sustained from him. “Black man, white man, red man, yellow man, it doesn’t matter because we’ve got our own brand of equality. In Prison every con’s a nigger and you have to get used to the idea if you intend to survive men like Hadley and Greg Stammas who really would kill you just as soon as look at you. When you’re in stir you belong to the state and if you forget it woe is you. I’ve known men who have lost eyes, men who have lost toes, Men who have lost fingers, I knew a man who lost the tip of his penis and counted himself lucky” (44) this shows the lack of moral judgment
The distressing experience of operating as a prison guard in such a notorious penal facility as New York State’s Sing Sing Penitentiary is one that is unlikely to be desired by one not professionally committed to the execution of prison uniformity. However, the outstanding novel written by Tom Conover illustrates the encounters of a journalist who voluntarily plunged himself into the obscure universe of the men and women paid to spend the better portion of their lives behind prison barriers. In Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, Conover creates a noteworthy document resonating personal emotional occurrences that nonetheless suggest the cultural sensitivity of a true prison guard. From the standpoint of our studies
We all make mistakes that we later regret, but that's life. We need to focus more on just accepting to live with it.
The first thing that I found was intriguing was the importance of the on- the-job training officers which qualifies recruits to become regular officers. “A training officer named Hill, told us that our job would be usually difficult, because OJT’s irritate inmates. Inmates appreciate a consistent set of keepers, he explained; they don’t like having the rules enforced differently everyday. This comes to show that it will either make or break a correctional officer, given that they will have a difficult time dealing with inmates or they will have to work extra hard to keep the inmates in line. An interesting fact that Conover points out is that, “you’re going to learn, correctional officers that some things they taught you in the academy can get you killed” (Pg 99). While he spent time on the work force at Sing Sing, Conover came to realize that many other officers don’t follow the rules instructed at the academy. The academy is successful in teaching the future officers how the field of law works. However, the correctional officers in the facilities have to change the rules quite a bit, so that the inmates follow the instructions. An example of a negative aspect of the academy is that it teaches CO’s to not communicate with the inmates. But, sometimes that isn’t practical and instead, CO’s should create a relationship with the inmate so that they have a strong bond. Lastly, I
This book is an honest account of life in Leavenworth Prison, Kansas based on interviews with notorious inmates and numerous other individuals. The book begins with introducing inmates such as Carl Bowles, Dallas Scott and William Post and offers insight information on the cultural aspect inside the prison itself. Once the basics are known to the reader, the author Pete Earley, develops the character of the prisoners and thus of the penitentiary as a whole.
Conover’s purpose in writing this book not only to share his experience as a correctional officer but to also help readers get beyond the stereotype of the brutal guard seen on television and rumors but to see correctional officers as individuals, offering us a chance to understand
After reading the book I have gained a new understanding of what inmates think about in prison. Working in an institution, I have a certain cynical attitude at times with inmates and their requests.
Prison guard positions have not been well-regarded by the masses. The low pay, even lower social status, possibility of attacks, and harsh prison environments support such a notion. Furthermore, workload issues, such as limited recovery time, multiple workloads and high peak loads have created stress among a majority of officers (Schaufeli & Peeters, 2011). Workload issues have been linked to dependence on certain staff and the inability to adequately fill positions (Schaufeli & Peeters, 2011). As a result, the hiring and overreliance on less qualified, undereducated, and non-experienced workers created
During the day of being a convict, they would be supervised by a military guard or another convict who was given the task where they would discipling other fellow convicts.
In the book NewJack: Guarding Sing Sing, the book discussed the life of a guard. Most people feel that the guards are bad guys in the criminal justice system and with the politics of the criminal justice systems there are many assumptions of the way in which the stereotype of prison guard’s life should be. The author Ted Conover explains first hand on the experiences behind the scenes that many guards experiences throughout their careers that is an untold story of the truth in the prison system. Conover was curious about the subculture of the prison guards’ duties and wanted to know the truth about if the assumptions that most have about the prison guards is truthful. Conover entered the Academy with many other young men and a few women who wanted good jobs with security. The training was modeled after boot camp for the military. Those who had been in the military fared better than those who had not been so initiated. Once Conover crossed the training hurdle, he was tossed over to Sing Sing for his first assignment.
When we do research on daily prison life, we come across two typical but less than ideal situations: either social imaginaries cloud our judgment or information provided by the prisons themselves hide certain weak or bad aspects that they do not want to make public. We can also find information on TV, but most of the time it either exaggerates or minimizes the facts. In order to obtain more reliable information, we have to have access to people who are working or have worked in this institution, and such will be the sources of this essay. We will be describing and giving examples of prison violence according to three types of violence: sexual, physical and psychological violence.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted by a research group led by Dr. Philip Zimbardo using Stanford students during August 14 through the 20th of 1971. Dr. Zimbardo wanted to see how people reacted when they are either put in captivity or in charge of others. The study was funded by the US Office of Naval Research and grew interest to both the US Navy and the Marine Corps for an investigation to the purpose of conflict among military guards and prisoners. In the study, 24 male students were selected out of 75 applicants to take on randomly assigned roles. One of the surprises of the study was how participants quickly adapted to roles well beyond expectations. After the first eight hours, the experiment turned to be a joke and nobody was taking it seriously but then prisoners
Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Suttree, demonstrates the prejudice deeply ingrained within society, as well as the way it largely affects its readers. The misogynistic attitude is certainly not a new one. Women have been oppressed and viewed as less than men, in personal accounts and in narratives, for a long time. In the minds of the men in this novel, women are seen as merely an addition to men or an afterthought, and certainly not able to hold the value of a whole person on their own. The only real relationships with women the reader observes are Cornelius Suttree’s romance with Wanda, and then with Joyce. The lens through which Suttree views women is skewed, hostile and distrustful. He consistently views women as either irrational, emotional, or as purely sexual objects. There are many examples of the twisted language used to describe women, from Suttree’s wife, to his mother, to waitresses in restaurants, to these women with which he is intimate.