When you hear the words “prison guard” what kind of image crosses
your mind? A tall, big, muscular male
with a deep voice who looks very
intimidating? Well, on Thursday, October 17, 20 students from the Honors
Institute piled into the Honors Observatory classroom for an informal
discussion with a former prison guard.
(Later, most of the school heard
him talk at a First-Year Convocation). When students got there, though,
all
their ideas about a prison guard disappeared. There Ted Conover sat
before them, looking nothing like a
former guard. He was quite short, of
average physique, and when he spoke, a soft and quiet voice emerged
rather than the loud and deep one that many expected to hear. With no
striking features, it was hard to
imagine him as a prison guard. In
fact, during an appearance on a TV game show, Paula Poundstone insisted
“she could knock him down with a feathered pillow.” For one year,
though, Mr. Conover was a guard at Sing
Sing, the maximum security
prison in up-state New York, and for the duration of that time, no one
at the prison
knew that he was an author, gathering information for his
book. In the award-winning book titled Newjack:
Guarding Sing Sing, Mr.
Conover writes about his experiences as a guard, giving readers a
perspective on a
group of people that are usually overlooked.
The discussion was filled with many stories from the book, but it also
involved new stories and personal
pieces of information that never made
it into the book. Conover was a good student in college and would
have
liked to be a truck driver or a musician if he had not become an author.
He got into this type of
writing in college, by wondering about his own
upbringing and how it was preventing him from learning
certain things
about the world. His experience as a prison guard opened his eyes to the
hidden world
behind those walls. Riots and fights are not an every day
occurrence and prisoners rarely escape, despite
what films show. When
inmates are asked what they are doing time for, they are usually not
truthful. The
majority of inmates do not want to be known as rapists but
as serial killers because it is more frightening
and makes new guards
uneasy. Others continuously proclaim their innocence. One story that he
told the
students was about an old inmate, Vincent, who had spent half
of his adult life in prison. He was in prison
this time for rape, but
was insisting he was innocent. Mr. Conover was skeptical because he knew
that
inmates do not always tell the truth. Six months after Newjack came
out, Mr. Conover saw Vincent on
television. It turns out that through
the Innocence Program, which uses DNA tests to prove that some
prisoners
have been wrongly convicted, Vincent was proven innocent and released.
As for the prison guards,
he found that even if you try not to be
brutal, the prison environment eventually brings these tendencies out
in
you. It is a very emotional and stressful job and since his experience,
Conover has a different outlook on
law enforcement and understands more
about the people who end up in prison.
One of his greatest fears about being discovered as an uncover writer
was that prison guards would take
offense and try to beat him up. In
fact, when Albion College Honors students went to meet him at the
airport,
he walked up to them said in jest “you’re either here to pick
me up, or here to beat me up.” Although he has
yet to come to harm,
there were mixed reactions to the release of his book. The senior
officers of the prison
were angry that a newjack (what new guards are
called) would write such a book because he could not possibly
know
everything about a prison after only one year of work. Many guards have
not read the book, but many
prisoners have (with the exception of a
couple of pages that have been ripped out of the prison’s copy.). The
rest
of the public has embraced the book. In fact, Mr. Conover now gets
calls from many news programs for his
“expert” input on stories that
involve inmates escaping and other prison-
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