A few days ago, I went with some colleagues to visit clients who are incarcerated at Sing Sing prison. Despite the tightly controlled atmosphere, one can reliably expect the unexpected at this sort of thing, and we worried the corrections officers (CO’s) would be more on edge than usual. Our visit came less than twelve hours after the New York Times published accusations that were sure to shock the public, or at least make the bigwigs slightly uneasy:
“corrections officers at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y., orchestrated beatings during a prisonwide search in November, sending at least seven prisoners to the hospital and more than 20 others to a medical unit”
“A flood of officers, including special teams from other prisons, converged on cells over at least two days, ordering prisoners to strip to their boxer shorts and then punching and kicking them and slamming their heads against walls or floors…”
“sworn statements describe one officer holding a man’s arm against a radiator, burning him, and another officer twisting a prisoner’s wrist and thumb and threatening to break his hand. Another prisoner describes how he was blinded for days after being pepper-sprayed while he was handcuffed.”
“They kept saying, ‘Stop resisting’ and ‘This is our house.’”
The New York Times, February 23rd, 2023. “At Sing Sing, Prisoners’ Charges of Brutal Beatings Prompt U.S. Inquiry”
But we were wrong; nobody seemed to be on edge at all. The CO’s greeted us with smiles, and apologized as they struggled over about two hours to process ‘gate clearances’ (i.e. photocopies of our IDs and a signed form) that would allow us to see our clients. One CO asked whether this career had been what I expected. “It’s a lot sadder than I thought it would be,” I told her. She nodded in agreement: “yeah, you wouldn’t believe the things we see.”
I would believe it, though. There’s a certain quality to legal visits that reminds me of the upside down, because one hears from their clients horrific and outlandish stories relayed as if they were an account of a trip to the grocery store. For example, I learned at another New York State facility about the concept of the “shit room,” a sadistic punishment device that CO’s prefer to the now legally-dubious long-term stays in solitary confinement. When a prisoner has caught their ire, he is strip searched on the alleged suspicion of contraband, whereafter they perform a cavity search. When nothing is found—because nothing is supposed to be found—he is locked in the ‘shit room,’ where without sanitary facilities he must defecate on the floor three times before he is released.
There are also more conventional forms of abuse, no-less frustrating to a prisoner’s dignity. The searching and theft of packages from family, the breaking of property like TV’s and radios, urinating on beds without allowing replacements, or arbitrary disciplinary tickets that prevent phone calls to loved ones.
This all easily passed off as the CO’s efforts to rid the facilities of drugs and contraband. The complaints of a prisoner are worth nothing to them, and a report of an incident can be made to say anything. But of course, as everyone at every facility already knows, the CO’s themselves are the source of the problem.
Perhaps my favorite part of the visits are the staff parking lots. The cars you see depend on the region (Chargers and Ram Trucks abound upstate), but they’re always beyond the means of the $25,000 to $69,000 annual salaries most CO’s draw. Perhaps their spouses are MD’s at Goldman, and many undoubtedly take second jobs to get by. (A colleague of mine got an Uber in Buffalo that was driven by an off-duty CO). But lots of corrections officers make extra money by smuggling contraband into facilities for the inmates to buy. Drugs? They bring them. iPhones? Those too. You can order takeout from prison if you pay the right person, and one inmate told me that female CO’s at Sing Sing offer sex to prisoners for a payment via CashApp.
The corruption of prisons is of their own making, but when it suits their needs or they wake up feeling assertive, corrections officers have no problem seizing contraband back, handing out discipline and new charges, beating the ‘offenders’ who paid them to get it.
One person we met at Sing Sing explained this very well. He was one of several inmates assigned to staff family visits—wiping down tables after visitation ended, and managing the corner of the room where inmates take pictures with family. (For a fee of two dollars, DOCCS offers the opportunity for an instant-film photo in front of a rolled-down image of an Italian villa.)
The legal visit rooms are right next to this corner. And we witnessed him and a few others chatting with a CO about their weightlifting programs. It looked like the cover page of a DOCCS brochure; a CO resting easy in his pressed light blues, discussing squats and nutrition with three smiling men in green jumpsuits.
In between our visits, we asked if they’d heard about the federal investigation, and whether they remembered the events in November. We couldn’t hand them anything while the CO’s watched, so I read in a hushed voice some excerpts from the article. They nodded, asked some questions, and looked uneasily at each other. “At least that one ended up in the paper.”
We were stuck by the contrast between the article and what we saw, and a colleague asked him if some CO’s could be respectful, even friendly to them. Silence for a few seconds, while they looked at the guard table. “We’re all in here together,” he started, then paused, “but we each have roles, and we’ve all got to play it. It don’t matter if you step out or do everything they say; at the end of the day its greens and blues.”
His comment stuck with me as we drove back to the city. It was a clean distillation of the nature of prisons, which, despite being sold as the paradigm of law and order, are in reality unruly scrums of violence and corruption and social disrepair. Even if we forget the morality of locking people in cages, if one zooms out and examines what a prison really is, it’s hard to see how it wouldn’t go wrong.
Take two groups of people, about 1700 in one and 700 in the other. Pair up the 1700 and lock them in cages, with crumbling concrete walls, rusty sanitary facilities, and food so bad that 90% of them can’t bring themselves to eat it. Give the 700 the keys to the facility, a working class salary, batons, long rifles, chains and handcuffs. Finally, among the 1700 assign a random number of years that they’ll stay in the cages, ranging from 1.5 to the rest of their natural life.
This is our solution to social dysfunction. 700 with guns and 1700 in cages, blues vs. greens, day after day. What kind of person could believe in this situation? Where is the healing, the accountability, in this farce we call justice? But people do live in it, sixteen-year-old kids and 88-year-old geriatrics, sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters and grandparents too. To see a prison like Sing Sing, much less to live there, is to witness a perpetual, ongoing tragedy.
The point I’m trying to make is this cannot be fixed. We are confronting in prisons a bankrupt idea. If you were shocked by that Times article and the brutality it exposes, just know that the people at Sing Sing were not. Our clients were surprised that such events could be news, and the CO’s behaved like it was just another day.