Ted Conover got clocked in the head, screamed at daily, humiliated by society's rejects for seven months straight and given the silent treatment by his wife--all in the name of experiential journalism.
The author has just finished a book about what it's like to be a guard at one of the most notorious prisons in the country. "Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing" (Random House) is the boldest project that Conover has pulled off, no small claim for a writer who has spent his career penetrating deep into shrouded territory and emerging with spicy yarns.
"Correction officers, like police officers, have their secrets," Conover said. "There's the public story versus the true story, the one that only the participants, the insiders, know. I wanted that story."
Every morning at 6, the author slipped on his guard uniform, looped a baton through his belt and trudged into the miserable, crumbling brick confines of 170-year-old Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. He had a three-part mission: maintain order among hundreds of violent misfits, stay safe and soak up--undercover--the impressions of the guard experience.
His duties were often ugly (think intimate body searches and wrestling prison-sculpted inmates to the ground) and the pay was lousy--$23 grand a year. His cover, at times, was tough to keep.
"Conover, man, you walk different from the other guards," he remembered one especially perceptive inmate saying. "What you do before here?"
Conover, 42, had done quite a bit of adventuring. Once a student of anthropology, he's carved out a niche as a writer by using participant observation methods to offer rich, gutsy accounts of unlikely subjects. His first project, at age 20, was on hobos, and he spent a year riding the rails before writing a book called "Rolling Nowhere." Next he traveled thousands of miles with illegal immigrants to produce "Coyotes." After that he became a cab driver in Aspen, Colo., to glean a new take on the ski slope scene for "Whiteout." He crisscrossed Africa with lustful truck drivers to chronicle the spread of AIDS for the New Yorker.
Conover lives in the Bronx, but a book tour recently brought him to Santa Monica, a place he fondly remembers as where a skinhead sucker-punched him at a doughnut shop a few years back for speaking Spanish with migrant workers. Things are better now. "Newjack," named for the term inmates use to describe new officers, was published in May and has already created a stir, recently gracing the cover of the New York Times Book Review and scoring Conover an appearance on "Oprah" last week.
