NewJack: Guarding Sing Sing: Chapter 5

by Ted Conover
In this nonfiction account, a journalist applies for a job as a corrections officer and explores conditions in one of America's most dangerous prisons.

Here are links to our lists for the book: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7–Epilogue
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. irrevocable
    incapable of being retracted
    In the same way that a murder forever changes a house, Sing Sing has its own irrevocable vibe, a haunted feeling surely unlike that of any other prison, one rooted in the ground and in history: thousands upon thousands of lashings meted out by my predecessors in the nineteenth century; hundreds of prisoners executed there by the state while strapped down in an electric chair built by other inmates
  2. corporal
    affecting the body as opposed to the mind or spirit
    From England and Europe, the United States had inherited a system of mainly corporal punishment for crimes.
  3. mutilate
    destroy or injure severely
    Before independence, Americans generally flogged, branded, or mutilated those felons they did not hang.
  4. spectacle
    something or someone seen, especially a notable sight
    The period between the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, wrote Michel Foucault, saw “the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle” and the gradual phasing out of corporal punishments.
  5. incarceration
    the state of being imprisoned
    As early as 1682, William Penn’s colonial government experimented with incarceration as an alternative to corporal and capital punishment.
    The differences between incarceration and corporal or capital punishments can be seen in the words' Latin roots: "carcer" means "prison, an enclosed space" while "corps" means "body" and "caput" means "head." Incarceration used to regularly include corporal punishments, and in some states, still leads to capital punishment. Although incarceration and corporal punishments can be deadly, capital punishment is the death sentence (head is connected to life).
  6. deterrence
    the act or process of discouraging actions
    The Quakers’ goals were prevention of further harm to society, deterrence, and, by the early nineteenth century, encouragement of prisoners to engage in “penitent reflection,” which could result in their personal reformation.
  7. penitentiary
    a correctional institution for those convicted of crimes
    Philadelphia’s Walnut Street jail, and later, in 1829, its massive Eastern State Penitentiary—the first institution to bear that label—were designed as places for prisoners to spend the day entirely alone, with only daytime work projects in their cells and a Bible for company.
    The word originated as an adjective, but its more common use as a noun and its shortening to "pen" emphasize that prisons are seen more as warehouses today. This differs from the first Quaker-run penitentiary, which held to the belief that prisoners can become penitentiary by reflecting on their wrongdoing, feeling sorry, and trying to change.
  8. obdurate
    stubbornly persistent in wrongdoing
    Thinking that a version of the separate system might be just the thing for its most “obdurate and guilty felons,” New York began to build a new north wing of Auburn, composed completely of solitary cells.
    Compare with "incorrigible" in the list for Chapter 4. In their example sentences, both adjectives describe criminals who will not change. Of the two, "obdurate" has a more negative tone: the Latin "durus" means "hard" so an obdurate criminal is hardhearted, while "corrigere" means "to correct, put straight, reduce to order, set right" so an incorrigible criminal can be someone who does wrong because there's something wrong inside of him that cannot be fixed.
  9. confinement
    the act of restraining a person's liberty
    From this experiment results the very reverse of those which had been anticipated, was produced; five of those who had been subjected to this confinement, died within a year, one of them had become insane, and another, watching an opportunity when his keeper brought him something, precipitated himself [jumped] from the gallery . . . the rest fell into a state of such deep depression, that their lives must have been sacrificed, had they remained longer in this situation.
  10. modify
    make less severe or harsh or extreme
    He modified the regime into something unique in the United States at the time: Inmates would be kept in individual cells at night but allowed to labor together in prison shops during the day, always in silence.
  11. coffer
    the funds of a government, institution, or individual
    This congregate system, or “Auburn system,” as it came to be known, produced more money for the public coffers than Pennsylvania’s (which allowed only individual work projects in the cell), and it drove fewer inmates insane.
  12. induce
    cause to act in a specified manner
    Tales of Lynds’s feat—of inducing inmates to build for themselves the largest prison in the land while unmanacled, uncontained by a prison wall—spread across the country and abroad.
  13. subjugation
    forced submission to control by others
    Lynds’s achievement—the seemingly total subjugation of a large group of violent inmates—is one that would probably dazzle most correction officers and wardens today.
    The noun's connection to cruel, physical force can be seen in its Latin roots: "sub" means "under" and "jugularis" means "pertaining to the throat or neck." Subjugation often involved putting a yoke around the neck. Although the prisoners were unmanacled (unchained) while they were building their own cellblock, five or six times a day, they were whipped.
  14. despotism
    dominance through threat of punishment and violence
    Though they did not say so to their hosts at Sing Sing, Tocqueville and Beaumont were finally dismayed that “whilst society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty, the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism.”
  15. synchronized
    operating in unison
    It was the lockstep, an Auburn innovation, in which the prisoner’s right hand rested on the shoulder of the man in front of him; his footsteps were short and synchronized, and his gaze was straight ahead—upon penalty of the lash.
  16. consternation
    sudden shock or dismay that causes confusion
    The sight of men being whipped as they struggled to move carts prompted consternation among a legislative committee convened to examine the prison in 1832, with particular attention to the system’s harsher aspects.
  17. innocuous
    not injurious to physical or mental health
    Starvation of men as another means of breaking them, and the floggings for which Lynds had been famous, were viewed by the legislative panel as less innocuous than he pretended.
  18. conviction
    an unshakable belief in something without need for proof
    And there was growing disapproval of his reluctance to allow relatives to visit or to exchange letters with inmates, his conviction that inmates should have no books other than a Bible and a prayer book, and other such harsh measures.
    Because the example sentence is about a prison warden under review, the use of the noun is a pun that suggests another definition: "a final judgment of guilty in a criminal case." The legal convictions of the prisoners helped Lynds to justify his personal conviction that control required harsh treatment. The controversy around this view can be seen in Lynds's career at Sing Sing: first, he was seen as a hero, then forced to resign, later rehired and soon after fired.
  19. abolish
    do away with
    Lynds’s belief that it was impossible to govern a prison without the cat was disproved in 1848, when use of the cat-o’-nine-tails was abolished by the legislature and the prison continued to operate much as it had before.
  20. renounce
    turn away from; give up
    Corporal punishment in general was not renounced, however; other punishments increased in frequency to fill the gap, and the keepers invented new ones
  21. barbaric
    without civilizing influences
    Certainly, outlawing barbaric punishments was evidence of progress in penal practice, and perhaps of progress in American civilization as well.
  22. humane
    showing evidence of moral and intellectual advancement
    Luckey, who has been called “the first social worker” for his research into inmates’ family backgrounds, wrote in 1860 that “much more depends upon the sound judgment and humane feelings of the disciplinarian than upon the instrument of punishment which he employs;—hence, a cruel man should never enter within the walls of a prison, except as a convict.”
    The adjective also means "marked by concern with the alleviation of suffering." Both definitions fit the example sentence, since a disciplinarian who is morally and intellectually advanced would be less likely to cause suffering and be more concerned with finding humane punishments that could ease the suffering of the wrongdoers, victims, families, and the larger society.
  23. enterprise
    an organization created for business ventures
    “A big business enterprise,” a prominent journalist called it; until 1884, a handful of contractors paid the state set sums for the labor of a certain number of men and then endeavored to get everything out of them they could.
  24. brandish
    move or swing back and forth
    Reports showed that at the behest of contractors, inmates were sometimes punished for poor work and that some contractors were even allowed to brandish the whip.
  25. perennial
    recurring again and again
    The contractor system was abolished in 1884, due in part to these perennial abuses but also because of the opposition of unions.
  26. grim
    shockingly repellent; inspiring horror
    The arrival of the electric chair in 1891 marked the beginning of the grim period for which Sing Sing grew world famous: as a center for executions.
    The adjective also means 1) harshly uninviting or formidable in manner or appearance; 2) filled with melancholy and despondency; 3) harshly ironic or sinister. All these definitions can describe the electric chair, but the example sentence is focused on a period of time when the electric chair was in use. This would eliminate 1) since the newness of the execution method drew many witnesses, who were often horrified by what they saw.
  27. burnish
    polish and make shiny
    The death of Druse gave new life to efforts to reform New York’s capital punishment, and in 1888 the legislature, hoping to burnish the reputation of the Empire State, established “electric execution” (electrocution was not in common usage yet) as the state’s official method.
  28. expeditious
    marked by speed and efficiency
    “The man was really killed by a clumsy stun,” reported Scientific American, “for which a dextrous blow from a pole ax would have been an expeditious substitute.”
  29. recrimination
    mutual accusations
    Amidst the recriminations and finger-pointing from the doctors, scientists, and prison officials, one might have expected the demise of electrocution technology.
  30. gruesome
    shockingly repellent; inspiring horror
    The hangman of the age of electricity appears in accounts of Sing Sing history as a character out of the movies, coming in from a foggy night to perform his gruesome work, then leaving without a good-bye.
    Compare with "grim" in this list (and "ghastly" in the list for Chapter 6). The chosen definitions are identical and both adjectives connect to the electric chair. "Grim" has other definitions that make it a less horrifying word choice than "gruesome." But their roots show that "grim" used to be a stronger word: the Old English "grimm" means "fierce, cruel, savage, painful" while the Middle Low German "gruwen" means "shudder with fear."
  31. welfare
    something that aids or promotes well-being
    The Mutual Welfare League, which slowly grew from this effort, was an administration-supervised means for inmates to run their own lives, from administering a system of discipline to organizing sports to starting a commissary where inmates could buy goods with a special League scrip.
  32. attenuated
    reduced in strength
    Though his profile was never again so high, and the institutions of reform he began were attenuated over the years, Osborne succeeded in shifting the course of American penal practice and modified the seemingly set in stone operations of two of the country’s biggest rock piles.
  33. demolition
    an event that completely destroys something
    Amidst the controversies and corruption, the many wardens, and the advent of “penology”—including progress in prison architecture and conditions elsewhere—the massive structure sat immobile, barely altered in a hundred years except for growing more crowded (six hundred cells were double-bunked in 1909) and losing a floor and a half in a 1917 demolition bid that was halted after the state realized it still needed the space.
  34. malevolent
    wishing or appearing to wish evil to others
    Yet, as the official department history put it, the cellblock “continued to hang like a millstone around the neck of the institution ... continued to swallow thousands of inmates into its malevolent, malodorous maw”—over a hundred thousand men in its first century alone.
    The alliterative phrase "malevolent malodorous maw" almost sounds yummy, but it actually personifies the old cellblock of Sing Sing as a monster with an evil, smelly mouth that eats up inmates. The small, damp, and badly ventilated conditions led to deadly diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, dysentery, and scarlet fever.
  35. incorporate
    include or contain; have as a component
    Sing Sing moved in some ways into the future, incorporating a small number of vocational programs, a few school courses, a counseling staff, and expanded opportunities for inmate recreation.
  36. unmitigated
    not diminished or moderated in intensity or severity
    “The incident that has erupted here at Attica is not a result of the dastardly bushwacking of the two prisoners Sept. 8, 1971,” they wrote, “but of the unmitigated oppression wrought by the racist administration network of the prison, throughout the year.”
  37. negotiate
    discuss the terms of an arrangement
    Governor Nelson D. Rockefeller refused to negotiate directly with the inmates, and on September 13, worried that the inmates were harming their hostages, the state police launched a bloody battle to retake the prison.
  38. implement
    ensure observance of laws and rules
    With one hand Rockefeller continued to implement some of the previously approved reforms—drug-rehabilitation programs, college-degree classes—but with his other, he pushed through the Assembly a raft of strict antidrug laws.
  39. relic
    an antiquity that has survived from the distant past
    Looking back for the reasons behind the B-block takeover, a state report commented that Sing Sing was by then “to most of the outside world ... a relic from musty books and old movies, which many people were surprised to learn was still in use after 157 years.”
  40. institution
    a custom that has been an important feature of some group
    As a former officer looking back into Sing Sing’s history, I was struck by lost institutions of the old prison, such as the bands that played as prisoners marched to chow.
    An institution can also be "an organization founded and united for a specific purpose" (such as the Department of Correctional Services). Or, it can be "an establishment where an organization is situated" ("prisons are perhaps the most racially divisive institutions in America today"). But here, the focus is on lost institutions within an institution, which contrasts with the wish for the institution ("the act of starting something for the first time") of reforms.
Created on Tue Mar 31 16:08:03 EDT 2015 (updated Mon Oct 01 15:13:29 EDT 2018)

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