Newjack By Ted Conover

   Ted Conover is an author and journalist who has spent many years writing and experience many cultural things many will never encounter in their life. He has covered stories from hoping trains with homeless men, traveling with illegal immigrants and even driving a cab for one whole year. His honest journalistic sense comes alive in his creative pieces as he gives you the most in-depth insight a person could get without actually doing.

  In Conover’s piece NewJack he himself becomes a Newjack, the term used for a new correctional officer and is eventually assigned to Sing Sing, New York’s maximum-security prison. You learn through Conover’s introduction to Sing Sing that it was built by inmates for inmates and at the time was the nation’s capital for capital punishment. After what you learn to believe is a short time in the academy and on the job training, Conover finds himself working, more than often alone and always unarmed inside galleries that house more than 60 inmates. He is responsible for the care and custody of many scared first-time inmates, gang members, drug addicts or violent predators. Inside the prison Conover writes with forwardness, not only giving the reader an in-depth view of the prison through his words but as well as the thought and questions that ponder him as he sees the reality of our nation’s prison system.

  Conover meets a variety of people through out his experience from  “bugs” or mentally disturbed inmates, the prison’s transvestites along with those that have spent years working inside the prison. He however is faced with many obstacles besides those housed inside the prison. He has to ask himself if the job can truly be done by the book. You learn to see past the stereotype of a correctional officer.

  The most important influence you see is how Conover portrays correctional officers as being forced by the circumstances they are under. He also clearly struggles as much as he feels for the inmates but knowing at any moment that could turn on him too.

“Cigarettes packs that lacked a New York State revenue stamp… were not allowed to be distributed to inmates, and were apparently thrown away. I thought of the inmates I know whom nobody was likely to remember at Christmas. There were lots of them. My heart went out to the most pathetic. When no one was looking I stuffed about a dozen of the cigarette packs into my jacket.”

Newjack has been praised as “sympathetic, intelligent, and engrossing” as Conover has been said to be “a gifted-and dedicated-journalist.” This riveting book will make you rethink everything you once thought about correctional officers. Conover, a professor at New York University teaching journalism, passes through the bars of brilliance with this book.