Testo, the director of the Department’s Bureau of Labor Relations, warned us against abusing these powers. His office revoked officers’ firearms permission several times a week, he said, for infractions such as being caught drinking while wearing a gun, menacing somebody with it, or having it stolen. Currently, the Department was being sued by a stockbroker who had been pulled over and then chewed out by a correction officer for speeding, Testo told us, sounding tired. Then there were guys who glued numbers under their badges so that they would resemble those of New York City Police Department detectives, and undertook their own “investigations.” Doing these things would get you fired, Testo said; and one in ten of us would receive a notice of discipline from his office sometime during his career. Not that the pressures weren’t understandable to Testo; he knew, he said, that inmates were “the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth. And we have to be with them every day.” But that didn’t excuse our abusing our authority.
On that first night at the Academy, Sergeant Bloom had asserted, unexpectedly, that “the most important thing you can learn here is how to communicate” with inmates. In the two or three weeks that followed, I had started to understand what he meant.Corrections was, albeit in a rarefied macho way, a “people-skills” profession. Much of our success and well-being as officers would depend upon how we carried ourselves and interacted with inmates.
But the Department’s idea of how to develop these skills was given to us in a short series of classes, Interpersonal Communication (IPC), taught by a would-be comedian. He had actually done stand-up comedy in clubs, Officer Speros told us, and for the first day we were less his class than his audience. Speros’s extemporaneous opening act was to decide which figures from popular culture we looked like: DiPaola was Bart Simpson, Chavez was Zorro, Dimmie was a soul singer from the 1970s. Somebody complained afterward to Sergeant Bloom about the racial overtones of Speros’s jokes, and Bloom, another trainer told us gravely, chewed him out for it. The next day the communications instructor, acting hurt, was all business.
By communicating effectively with inmates, Speros began, we could keep problems from escalating, build relationships with inmates, manage them better. In addition, he said with a wink, listening carefully would enable us to get information out of inmates, get them to tell us things “when they don’t even know it!”
Speros used graphs and charts and handouts to detail the cutely named stages and progressions (The Basics, The Add-Ons, Taking Charge)—the fashions of business-management training had spread to corrections. But what everyone left with was a funny method that we watched in a film and that Speros made us try. He called it Responding to Content. We called it What You’re Saying Is … The point was to show an inmate that you were listening to him by keeping quiet until he was through, then rephrasing his point so that he knew you had heard him—even if you then disagreed or were not persuaded. It was a good technique, I suppose, but it made for hilarious exchanges at dinner that evening (“So what you’re saying is, you want more Salisbury steak?”) and in days to follow, when we imagined how it would sound in a place like Coxsackie: “So what you’re saying is, I’m a skinny white motherfucker and you wish I were dead—is that it?”
Strangely enough, in view of this class, we had been told never to communicate with the handful of inmates who worked in the Academy. Some were there every day, ladling out our food in the mess-hall line; we grew to recognize their faces. Others came aswork crews from Coxsackie to vacuum and dust the lounges or clean up the filthy rest rooms. These crews—always, in my experience, made up of young black men—were watched over by tough-looking armed COs wearing
On that first night at the Academy, Sergeant Bloom had asserted, unexpectedly, that “the most important thing you can learn here is how to communicate” with inmates. In the two or three weeks that followed, I had started to understand what he meant.Corrections was, albeit in a rarefied macho way, a “people-skills” profession. Much of our success and well-being as officers would depend upon how we carried ourselves and interacted with inmates.
But the Department’s idea of how to develop these skills was given to us in a short series of classes, Interpersonal Communication (IPC), taught by a would-be comedian. He had actually done stand-up comedy in clubs, Officer Speros told us, and for the first day we were less his class than his audience. Speros’s extemporaneous opening act was to decide which figures from popular culture we looked like: DiPaola was Bart Simpson, Chavez was Zorro, Dimmie was a soul singer from the 1970s. Somebody complained afterward to Sergeant Bloom about the racial overtones of Speros’s jokes, and Bloom, another trainer told us gravely, chewed him out for it. The next day the communications instructor, acting hurt, was all business.
By communicating effectively with inmates, Speros began, we could keep problems from escalating, build relationships with inmates, manage them better. In addition, he said with a wink, listening carefully would enable us to get information out of inmates, get them to tell us things “when they don’t even know it!”
Speros used graphs and charts and handouts to detail the cutely named stages and progressions (The Basics, The Add-Ons, Taking Charge)—the fashions of business-management training had spread to corrections. But what everyone left with was a funny method that we watched in a film and that Speros made us try. He called it Responding to Content. We called it What You’re Saying Is … The point was to show an inmate that you were listening to him by keeping quiet until he was through, then rephrasing his point so that he knew you had heard him—even if you then disagreed or were not persuaded. It was a good technique, I suppose, but it made for hilarious exchanges at dinner that evening (“So what you’re saying is, you want more Salisbury steak?”) and in days to follow, when we imagined how it would sound in a place like Coxsackie: “So what you’re saying is, I’m a skinny white motherfucker and you wish I were dead—is that it?”
Strangely enough, in view of this class, we had been told never to communicate with the handful of inmates who worked in the Academy. Some were there every day, ladling out our food in the mess-hall line; we grew to recognize their faces. Others came aswork crews from Coxsackie to vacuum and dust the lounges or clean up the filthy rest rooms. These crews—always, in my experience, made up of young black men—were watched over by tough-looking armed COs wearing
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