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mediums and minimums, and work-release and mental-health facilities. (State prisons hold people with sentences of a year or more. Inmates awaiting trial or those serving shorter terms stay in local jails, such as New York City’s giant Rikers Island complex, near La Guardia Airport. Federal prisons generally house criminals convicted of federal crimes—often, drug dealers.)
    Fifty of the state’s seventy-one prisons were built in the last twenty-five years, a period in which the number of inmates has increased nearly sixfold, from 12,500 to over 70,000, due mostly to mandatory sentencing laws for drug offenses. The majority of these inmates are young men of color from New York City. Because the state government is based in Albany, however, and the state senate is dominated by politicians from rural precincts, nearly all the prison construction has been outside of andaway from New York City, where job-hungry communities clamor for it.
    A state salary goes far in small-town New York—correction officers, after eight years, make nearly $40,000 and enjoy numerous job benefits. Reflecting the demographic makeup of the state’s small towns, the officer corps is overwhelmingly white. As inmates are overwhelmingly minority, the racial hierarchy at most facilities resembles that of South Africa under apartheid.
    Both inmates and younger officers tend to be on the move. Inmates are often shifted, with little notice, between facilities, according to obscure agendas of the Department. Officer recruits leave home to go to the Academy, then typically spend the next few years trying to get back: often, their first posting is Sing Sing, which always needs staff because of its chaotic reputation and location in pricey Westchester County. (Because of the prison’s proximity to New York City, the regular staff of Sing Sing is predominantly minority—an exception to the statewide rule.) The more desirable prisons have seniority-based waiting lists of up to several years. Until they get where they really want to be, most correction officers will hit the road for home at the beginning of two days off, even if it means a six- or seven-hour drive. And they’ll play hopscotch, transferring upstate from one “jump jail” to the next, until they can finally live at home again. Thus most of my classmates, starting with their seven weeks at the Academy, were becoming a kind of migrant worker.

    Sergeant Bloom hoped to weed out the unsatisfactory recruits as soon as possible. With that goal in mind, he explained to us later, he sent our section on a field trip the second day, to a real prison called Coxsackie.
    It was about a forty-minute drive from the Academy. We didn’t know another thing about it until the driver of our state school-bus, CO Popish, pulled up to the old complex of brick buildings ringed with tall fences and swirls of razor wire and shut off the engine. There were a few bare trees around, and some snow gusting over dead brown grass. Popish swung around in his seat. He was chubby and pale, and the other instructors didn’t seem to respect him much; driving the bus was, apparently, a chump job. But when Popish began to speak, our nervous chatter quickly stopped. Coxsackie, he said, was “a prison for youthful offenders.” Things hadbeen rough here lately; there had been attacks on guards, he added. With that the bus grew completely silent. It rocked slightly in the wind. Two officers had been slashed in the head, Popish said; one was now on disability. Two years ago, the Box was attacked, and the guy in the control booth held hostage. Popish described having seen the baton of a CO who came face-to-face with a shank-wielding inmate; the baton had a large slice cut out of it.
    Our guide here, Popish said, would be McCorkle—one of the officers who had harassed us on the night of our arrival at the Academy. When he wasn’t training officers, he worked as a CO at Coxsackie, which he called “Gladiator School,” or “the