Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing

Criminals once traveled upriver to Sing Sing by boat from New York City, and the prison was built upon the rocky slope rising from the Hudson River. Located in present-day Ossining, housing has slowly become unaffordable on a correction officer’s salary. The new recruits, Conover’s classmates, have found shared housing in poor conditions. The cohort will spend the next four weeks on OJT, on-the-job training.

At the time, Sing Sing is being utilized in many ways as a training facility for new recruits. Thirty-four percent of officers have less than a year on the job, and there are upwards of seven-hundred-and-fifty security employees at the prison. Sing Sing is the second oldest prison after Auburn, and the second largest after Clinton.Sing Sing contains almost two-thousand inmates in maximum security and nearly six hundred in Tappan, the prison’s medium-security compound. There are about two-thousand violent felons, with around sixhundred imprisoned for murder or manslaughter. Fifty-six percent of inmates are black, thirty-two percent are Hispanic, and ten percent areCaucasian. There are few vocational programs, as almost all college-level programs had ceased in 1994 and 1995 due to federal lawmakers ending funding. Five inmates have committed suicide in five months, and the inmate-grievance system receives twenty-five grievances a week.