NewJack: Guarding Sing Sing: Chapter 7–Epilogue

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 15 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. proliferate
    grow rapidly
    This sense of shame is growing: the psychologists and the minor civil servants of moral orthopaedics proliferate on the wound it leaves.
  2. seep
    pass gradually or leak or as if through small openings
    Prison got into your skin, or under it. If you stayed long enough, some of it probably seeped into your soul.
  3. accoutrement
    accessory or supplementary item of clothing
    In the locker room I searched around for my game face, found it around the time I strapped the gear onto my belt: baton, latex-gloves holder, key clips—the tough stuff, the accoutrements of guard identity.
  4. sully
    make dirty or spotty
    And in a different way, I didn’t want to sully the kitchen table with the kinds of things I’d seen and heard during the day; it just seemed best to keep it inside.
  5. envelop
    enclose or enfold completely with or as if with a covering
    Black moods would come from out of nowhere and envelop me.
  6. rigid
    incapable of compromise or flexibility
    You’re not just oblivious, she responded, you’re ridiculously rigid and prickly.
    The example sentence is a complaint from the author's wife. During the year he worked as a correction officer, in addition to being rigid, he was prickly ("very irritable") and oblivious ("failing to keep in mind") to her, their kids, and their friends. The complaint made the author angry ("How dare she complain when I'm working so hard to hold myself together, to maintain a calm exterior?"). But his inclusion of the scene emphasizes his point about the negative effects of prison.
  7. intrigue
    cause to be interested or curious
    Despite the problems, work still intrigued me on many levels.
  8. vex
    disturb the peace of mind of
    What vexed me was that I knew it was true, that despite my exertions and desire to do well, despite my college degree, I wasn’t better at the actual job of being a guard than anybody else.
  9. osmosis
    diffusion of molecules through a semipermeable membrane
    It was an unfortunate way to start the day, since sometimes one inmate’s hostility seemed to spread, through a form of osmosis, to those who hadn’t even witnessed any altercation.
  10. patina
    a fine coating of oxide on the surface of a metal
    The inmates’ protests, though they had a patina of moral force, only hardened my resolve.
    The noun is used figuratively to describe the thin layer of morality in the inmates' arguments. There could also be a pun intended, since in Latin, "patina" means "dish, pan"--on duty in a mess hall, the author is arguing with the inmates about how much food they can take and put on a plate. But his resolve ("firmness in purpose or belief") can also be seen as a figurative patina, because he later tells an inmate with an extra juice to drink it where no one can see.
  11. zeal
    excessive fervor to do something or accomplish some end
    He wasn’t completely right, but I did realize I was wearing myself out with zeal.
  12. bemused
    perplexed by many conflicting situations or statements
    He looked bemused, not angry, when he saw an infraction, and his look said to the inmate, “Did you really think you were going to get away with that?”
    The meaning of the adjective here is closer to "amused" than "bewildered." This is suggested by the contrast with "angry" and by an earlier description of Smith maintaining a sense of humor. Here, he is not actually laughing; he understands the inmates want extra food, but he does his duty with his arms crossed and gives looks that tell the inmates that they are not going to get away with stealing packets of ketchup right under his eyes and nose.
  13. ostracize
    avoid speaking to or dealing with
    And, as no one could consider him an object of desire, he was ostracized.
  14. persecute
    cause to suffer
    Did Janice feel persecuted inside prison because of who he was?
  15. vigor
    active strength of body or mind
    But I’m not sure I could vouch for my desires if I were imprisoned for a long time in a densely packed world without women and at the peak of my sexual vigor.
  16. consensual
    involving or existing by mutual agreement
    The next-most-common type of prison sex, after the autoerotic, is certainly consensual.
  17. adrenaline
    hormone secreted by the adrenal gland in response to stress
    R-and-W was my adrenaline challenge and stress test; V-gallery, by virtue of being half the size, was a place where I could be a better officer and have more of a chance of feeling, at shift’s end, that some of the inmates were actually human.
  18. impervious
    not admitting of passage or capable of being affected
    Though inmates still tested and tried to intimidate me on V, they did so without knowing that after the pressures of working R-and-W, I felt almost impervious to their lesser demands.
  19. fatalistic
    accepting that everything that happens is inevitable
    Though Perch was no doubt imagining how he’d like to tear me limb from limb, I felt strangely calm, fatalistic.
    Fatalistic people accept that everything that happens is inevitable because they do not have the power to change their lives. This can be an extremely fatal ("having extremely unfortunate consequences" or "bringing death") attitude, especially if one is faced with a life-threatening situation. It is not the normal attitude for the author, because his book urges reform. Despite feeling calm and fatalistic, he takes the precaution of asking another officer to accompany him.
  20. prohibit
    command against
    Back in the 1930s, warden Lewis Lawes had upset the inmate population by prohibiting the popular practice of tending rabbits.
  21. atavistic
    characteristic of a throwback
    Pure atavistic hatred and butchery from people who moments before might have said, “Good morning, Officer.”
    An atavist is "an organism that has the characteristics of a more primitive type of that organism." Thus, "pure atavistic hatred" describes a level of hatred so deep that it should belong more to primitive humans who have not been civilized (compare with "barbaric" in the list for Chapter 5). The possibility that an inmate could politely greet an officer one moment and then jump into hateful butchery the next is one of the stresses of working in a prison.
  22. catharsis
    purging of emotional tensions
    There were moments when, due to the constant tension of prison life and the general lack of catharsis, violence and the potential for violence became a thrill.
  23. despondent
    without or almost without hope
    The handcuffed, injured inmates looked not despondent but electrified.
  24. siege
    an action of an armed force that surrounds a fortified place
    Instead, guards adopt a siege mentality—a shutting up, a closing of ranks—that is law enforcement at its stupidest.
  25. untenable
    incapable of being defended or justified
    It didn’t mean their position was untenable; it just meant they had to put up with a lot of shit that white officers did not.
  26. pathology
    any deviation from a healthy or normal condition
    Prison life creates its own pathologies.
  27. blase
    nonchalantly unconcerned
    But then I decided that his blase attitude about serving time might be a pose.
    A blase person is often unconcerned because he is bored by too much exposure to the subject or situation. The inmate tries to give off that attitude by referring to his previous bids in prison. But the author suspects the attitude is a pose intended to convince other inmates that he's a hardened criminal who should not be messed with.
  28. ineffable
    defying expression or description
    Under the inmates’ surface bluster, their cruelty and selfishness, was almost always something ineffably sad.
  29. catacomb
    an underground tunnel with recesses where bodies were buried
    Sing Sing at night felt like a catacomb.
  30. disconcerted
    having self-possession upset; thrown into confusion
    I was disconcerted by the cells with lights still on and inmates standing up, because they were invariably backlit and I couldn’t see their faces or what their hands were doing.
  31. assuage
    provide physical relief, as from pain
    He was an old-timer and apparently had thought of a way to assuage his own irritating feelings of loss of control.
    Compare with "alleviate" in the list for Chapter 6. The verbs are synonymous, but their roots show some difference: the Latin "alleviare" means "to lighten" (which makes the word choice appropriate because the author alleviated the suffering of a 350-pound inmate and his squeezed-in cellmate); and "suavis" means "sweet, agreeable" (which makes the word choice ironic because the old-timer assuaged his own irritation by sternly yelling at the author).
  32. curt
    speaking in a terse, rude, or abrupt way
    Thinking maybe Albany was unnecessarily equating me with the devil, I sent a signed copy to the commissioner of corrections, which he acknowledged with a curt note
  33. predatory
    living by or given to victimizing others for personal gain
    The prison would then forward the book to Albany, where somebody would physically tear out six pages that, according to officials, were “a potential source of injury or conflict among violent and predatory offenders within our system.”
  34. admirable
    inspiring approval
    Indeed, when this was all playing out in the summer of 2000, The New York Times quoted an official of the correction officers’ union as saying, “We have no problem with the book. What he did was admirable.”
  35. trepidation
    a feeling of alarm or dread
    The atmosphere of controversy did give me some trepidation about a reading I was scheduled to give at the Ossining Public Library in June of 2000.
  36. foreboding
    a feeling of evil to come
    I had a sense of foreboding much like the one that had suffused so many of my days at Sing Sing—a feeling of imminent confrontation, of badness just ahead.
  37. poignant
    keenly distressing to the mind or feelings
    For all the time I spent in an officer’s uniform, one poignant reality of the life had only begun to sink in, and that was the depth of the stigma they felt, the pain of society’s disregard.
  38. antidote
    a remedy that stops or controls the effects of a poison
    The antidote was recognition and an appreciation of the job’s unique difficulties.
  39. betray
    give away information about somebody
    The occasional dissenter accuses me of betraying my fellow officers and being a rat, asserting that “what goes on in corrections should stay in corrections.”
    The verb also means "deliver to an enemy by treachery." Both definitions fit the example sentence, since the author never told his fellow officers that he was only temporarily working at Sing Sing so that he could gather information for a book (so he could be seen as a spy who broke their trust). The second definition also emphasizes some of the officers' "us vs. them" attitude (in prison, it's officers vs. inmates; outside prison, it's officers vs. the press).
  40. therapeutic
    tending to cure or restore to health
    Writing the book was sometimes therapeutic in the same way, though just as often the prospect of sitting down at my desk on a sunny morning and mentally transporting myself back to Sing Sing for the day was painful.
Created on Tue Mar 31 16:51:41 EDT 2015 (updated Mon Oct 01 15:13:50 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.