NewJack: Guarding Sing Sing: Chapter 6

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
40 words 12 learners

Learn words with Flashcards and other activities

Definition First
Print Flashcards

Other learning activities

Answer a few questions about each word. Use this to prep for your next quiz! Compete with other teams in real time to see who answers the most questions correctly! Test your spelling acumen. Read the definition, listen to the word and try spelling it!

Teaching tools

Create and assign quizzes to your students to test their vocabulary. Assign learning activities including Practice, Vocabulary Jams and Spelling Bees to your students, and monitor their progress in real-time.

Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. stealth
    the act of moving in a quiet or secretive way to avoid being noticed
    Not en masse—just stealth encounters, stabbings without warning.
  2. retaliation
    action taken in return for an injury or offense
    One incident provokes the next; we’re told that the cycles of retaliation began at Rikers Island earlier this month.
  3. ghastly
    shockingly repellent; inspiring horror
    The most ghastly wound is on a man who looks about nineteen: a ragged cicatrix that winds from one corner of his mouth to beneath his left ear, then all the way around his head, under the right ear, and back to the other corner of the mouth, as though the assailant intended to peel off the top: a sadist’s trophy.
  4. contempt
    lack of respect accompanied by a feeling of intense dislike
    This was because, to relieve their boredom and express their contempt, inmates were occasionally tossing items out of their cells in hopes they might hit one of us.
  5. obstacle
    an obstruction that stands in the way
    The floor of the narrow gallery was an obstacle course—littered with chicken bones from dinner the night before, toast from breakfast, jam packets and scrambled eggs, spilled coffee and juice, covered by a layer of Styrofoam cups and clamshells.
  6. privilege
    a special advantage or benefit not enjoyed by all
    Inmates asserted privilege in time-tested ways that were difficult to deny (“I’m the head yard porter, CO, so I’ve got to get out there before they drop rec—Smitty always just lets me wait by the door down there.”).
  7. errant
    straying from the right course or from accepted standards
    And inmates from other galleries dropped by, some of them for legitimate reasons (the law library porter was supposed to be walking around picking up and dropping off books) and some not (errant gallery porters from other floors who parked themselves in front of their buddies’ cells were a constant problem).
  8. reprisal
    a retaliatory action against an enemy
    The next day, someone else on W had been beaten up—a reprisal, from the looks of it—and was taken to the ER.
    Compare with "retaliation" in this list. Both nouns are used to describe a cycle of violence in prison. But the words were not always synonymous. The Latin "talio" means "exaction of payment in kind" and this was used in both a positive and negative sense. "Reprendere" means "take back" and this often involved seizing property or citizens from an enemy to both punish and make up for what was lost.
  9. foible
    a minor weakness or peculiarity in someone's character
    You’d get to know a small group of men, their characters and foibles, and they’d get to know you.
  10. invective
    abusive language used to express blame or censure
    Maybe there wouldn’t be the constant testing or rudeness or invective, because you’d know you were going to be together the next day.
  11. strife
    bitter conflict; heated or violent dissension
    These reverberations of gangland strife at Rikers, plus the huge size of the galleries, the constant turnover of inmates and, especially, officers, ensured there was no chance of cozy community developing.
  12. carve
    engrave or cut by chipping away at a surface
    Soap carving was a time-honored jailhouse art.
  13. compromise
    expose or make liable to danger, suspicion, or disrepute
    It wasn’t good to know their personal lives, because they might try to drag you into them, which would compromise security.
    The verb also has a positive meaning that connects to being flexible in arriving at a settlement of differences. But throughout the book, the word is used negatively: "it is due to a tour de force which is reborn unceasingly and which has to be reproduced each day, under penalty of compromising the whole system of discipline"; "Anyone holding the job was hopelessly compromised as any sort of moral example."
  14. alliance
    a connection based on kinship, marriage, or common interest
    On the other hand, it helped security to be aware of their alliances, of gang unrest, and so forth.
  15. disarray
    untidiness, especially of clothing and appearance
    It was generally known among us that the Latin Kings, a Puerto Rican gang originally from Chicago, was the most powerful group in B-block and that the rival Bloods, originally from Los Angeles, were in disarray.
  16. faction
    a clique that seeks power usually through intrigue
    This hard-line faction, born of New York prisons and ghettos, believed that 85 percent of black people were like ignorant cattle, 10 percent were bloodsuckers (politicians, preachers, and others who profited from the labor and ignorance of the docile 85 percent), and an anointed 5 percent were the poor, righteous teachers of freedom, justice, and equality.
  17. hygiene
    a condition promoting sanitary practices
    The psychologist at the Academy had spoken about the high number of mentally ill inmates mixed in with the “normal” ones: psychotics with poor hygiene (“You smell ’em before you see ’em”) or odd associations (Bill Clinton, they’d believe, was in charge of the Clinton Correctional Facility); hallucinators who thought that football players in the huddle were talking about them or that the state had implanted microchips in their brains.
  18. disparate
    fundamentally different or distinct in quality or kind
    prison work was an exercise in the massive erosion of distinctions, the lumping together of disparate kinds, the suppression of the mind’s ability to perceive difference.
    "Distinct," "disparate" and "different" are synonymous adjectives; "erosion," "lumping together" and "suppression" all describe a decreased ability to see the inmates as individual humans. Although this approach sounds inhumane, it is encouraged partly to protect the inmates (so that an officer would not treat a child molester any differently than he would a drug dealer) and partly to protect the officers (so they don't get compromised).
  19. intricate
    having many complexly arranged elements; elaborate
    As one of a small number of inmates—maybe three in the block—who drew custom-made greeting cards for other inmates, he spent many hours in his cell using a vast collection of felt-tipped pens to create cards with intricate designs and a personalized message
  20. refer
    use a name to designate
    Inmates not only often referred to each other by nickname, they amused each other by coming up with nicknames for officers, too.
  21. inclination
    an attitude of mind that favors one alternative over others
    “Don’t get conned by Conover the Conman. He knows a conman ’cause he’s a conman,” said a friendly inmate with rapper inclinations.
  22. loiter
    linger, remain, or wait around for no apparent reason
    I patrolled to make sure the work got done and no one was loitering.
  23. beatific
    resembling or befitting an angel or saint
    But instead of seething with anger like so many other keeplocks, Larson had an aura of beatific calm.
  24. conduit
    a passage through which water or electric wires can pass
    I had at first suspected Larson of being a conduit for contraband—and I never ruled this possibility out—because he was always exchanging everything from magazines to M&M’s with the inmates who stopped by.
  25. bliss
    a state of extreme happiness
    He preceded me to the shower, and I locked him in for his ten or so minutes of allotted bliss.
  26. conspicuous
    obvious to the eye or mind
    Like so many other inmates, he had a dozen or so girlie pinups on his wall, but his were conspicuously clothed.
  27. literacy
    the ability to read and write
    Apart from prison literacy courses, he said, he was entirely self-educated.
  28. paranoia
    a mental disorder characterized by delusions of persecution
    It may be that I was a bit paranoid, given my secret mission, but paranoia was nothing foreign to B-block.
  29. agitate
    try to stir up (e.g., public opinion)
    The fear that if you agitated too much you might disappear on a transfer to another prison or suddenly come down with AIDS was common among black nationalists, he told me.
    As a participial adjective, "agitated" means "troubled emotionally, usually deeply." This could describe the black nationalists' attitude towards the powerful prison system. But the example sentence uses "agitated" as a verb to describe what the black nationalists would do, if they weren't so scared of what could happen to them.
  30. suspect
    imagine to be the case or true or probable
    And I soon realized that he himself suspected that the system could probably just do away with you if it wanted to.
    As a verb, "suspect" can also mean "regard as untrustworthy" (which describes how Larson sees the prison system, but the chosen definition fits the example sentence better since he's imagining what it could do to him) or "believe to be guilty" (which describes how the author saw Larson's connection to contraband). It can also be a noun (all the inmates had been suspects of a crime) or an adjective ("not as expected"--the author finds Larson's theory suspect).
  31. decry
    express strong disapproval of
    He passed me a couple of dog-eared photocopies from radical journals that decried the huge social resources being devoted to imprisonment—$35 billion a year in the United States and growing, despite the drop in violent crime.
  32. chapel
    a place of worship that has its own altar
    Around 10:30 that morning, inmates began returning to the block in escorted groups from their morning programs—mostly chapel, yard, and gym on a Sunday, but also school, library, commissary, package room, and hospital on weekdays.
  33. distribute
    give to several people
    They were supposed to go directly to their cells and lock in for the 11 A.M. count, but many stopped to talk with friends, to trade magazines (including pornography, known universally as “short eyes”), or to distribute items they’d bought at the commissary.
  34. consequence
    the outcome of an event
    A consequence of putting men in cells and controlling their movements is that they can do almost nothing for themselves.
  35. favor
    an act of gracious kindness
    Not all of these were improper requests; but the others were mainly favors, to be done when I had spare time, which was seldom.
  36. foul
    become or cause to become obstructed
    Some inmates, for example, would try to flush something huge, like a bedsheet, in hopes it might foul up the entire block’s plumbing or allow them to flood the gallery.
    The word is used as a verb here, but if the inmates succeed in fouling the plumbing, the entire cellblock can be described as foul: "offensively malodorous" or "disgustingly dirty."
  37. entitled
    qualified for by right according to law
    Box time probably meant he’d assaulted an officer, and the Box was so full that he might technically still be serving Box time even though he was now on a gallery and therefore might still not be entitled to have his personal property back.
  38. alleviate
    provide physical relief, as from pain
    Two weeks earlier, I had discovered that Department policy let guys who were 300 pounds or over get out of their double-bunked cells, for obvious reasons, and I had been able to alleviate the misery of a 350-pounder and his squeezed-in roommate.
  39. forlorn
    marked by or showing hopelessness
    The forlorn-looking young man showed me the bullet hole near the patella; there was no exit scar.
  40. discontent
    a longing for something better than the present situation
    There seemed to be a lot of discontent.
    This example sentence can apply to the inmates. But it actually describes the attitude of the correction officers towards Mama Cradle, the officer in charge who was "often overwrought" ("deeply agitated especially from emotion") and "increasingly prone to abusiveness." This suggests that inmates and officers are not that different in how they want to be treated by authority figures.
Created on Tue Mar 31 16:27:08 EDT 2015 (updated Mon Oct 01 15:13:37 EDT 2018)

Sign up now (it’s free!)

Whether you’re a teacher or a learner, Vocabulary.com can put you or your class on the path to systematic vocabulary improvement.