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Cleve Dobbins was a scatterbrained former Army M.P. in his forties. Carlos Bella had been a guard/counselor for New Jersey’s juvenile detention services department. Felix Chavez, a courtly Puerto Rican from Brooklyn, had worked as assistant to a building’s super. I too had managed an apartment complex, I could answer truthfully, and had also driven a cab. Peter DiPaola had worked as an accountant for a vending machine company. Matt Di Carlo, a Navy veteran and CO’s son, had run a gas station and, for the present, was still doing so on weekends. Diandre Dimmie was another former DFY guard; judging by his sharp suits, it made sense that he had also worked in a men’s clothing shop. Brian Eno was an intelligent, pear-shaped former emergency medical technician. Diminutive Anthony Falcone had recently finished his hitch with the Army.
    To see if any of us were going to have trouble with the physical-performance test, Nigro hung a whistle around his neck after lunch and marched us, four abreast, across the Academy parking lot to the gym. The gym was set up for a run-through of the test, and the first thing I noticed when we came in was the heavy gray dummy dangling limply from the high ceiling by a noose around its neck. He was going to be part of the test. Another dummy lay next to him on the floor. Nearby stood a large track-and-field timer sign and a lot of other equipment.
    Nigro explained that there were ten stops on the circuit, and we had to complete all of them within two minutes and fifteen seconds. Every task simulated an actual situation we might have to deal with as correction officers. Nigro said we’d better clap and cheer as our classmates ran through the course. A dozen preceded me; suddenly I was next. Nigro blew the whistle.
    I grabbed a big silver fire extinguisher and, awkwardly, sprinted about thirty-five yards with it (to put out a fire set by an inmate, of course). Turning, I pushed with all my might against a movable wall (simulating an inmate barricade) and then climbed up and down a ladder attached to the side of the gym (simulating a wall tower). The 160-pound dummy—a stand-in for a suicidal inmate—was next: I wrapped my arms around his middle and lifted him up to relieve the pressure around the neck. Presumably, during the time I was holding him, another officer would be cutting him down. A whistle blew after I’d held him there for ten seconds, so I let him down gently (“Don’t break his neck!” Nigro shouted) and quickly went to the lying-down dummy. This, apparently, was thedummy who didn’t make it. The job here was to drag him about fifty feet.
    I was breathing hard when that was done, but right in front of me lay an eighty-pound barbell to raise from floor to standing position and hold for several seconds more—here I was carrying my end of a stretcher. The next stop was a gymnastics horse to vault (just to show we were not too out of shape); to my dismay, I wiped out on the far side. But my classmates cheered anyway, and in a flash, I had staggered to my feet and was threading my way around three quarters of the gym through a red-cone slalom course and then running up a staircase to the gym’s second floor and back down. Finally, to simulate pulling together the arms of a struggling inmate in order to handcuff him behind his back, I squeezed together a pair of calipers representing fifty pounds of resistance. And was through.
    As I stood aside panting, the next recruit took off. Several more of them fell while coming over the horse, and two of the women had trouble squeezing the calipers. But everyone made it around in time, and Nigro, who might have had trouble negotiating the course himself, looked relieved.

    New York’s seventy-one prisons are scattered across the state. Among them are famous maximum-security prisons—Sing Sing, Attica (in western New York, near Buffalo), Auburn (midstate), and Clinton (in the northern Adirondacks, near Canada)—as well as a variety of