One of the first situations that required Conover to be flexible occurred shortly after he received his appointment letter from the Department of Correctional Services. Conover was slated to begin his officer training on the same day he was to give a talk at a club about his recent Alaskan trip. In the end, Conover chose to reschedule, despite his personal feelings about the matter. He admitted that his excuse about a "trip that couldn't be postponed" was "the first of the thousand dodges and sorry-I-can't-talk-about-its" he had had to make for the next thirty months of his training. Conover learned that flexibility and communication skills were essential if he wanted to safeguard his personal mission.
In the book, we learn that Conover's original mission was to shadow a corrections officer recruit at the Albany Training Academy. Due to a frightening childhood experience, he had become fascinated with the subject of incarceration. As a writer, he wanted to observe and record the prison experience from the perspective of a corrections officer. After he was denied permission to shadow a recruit, Conover decided to become a corrections officer recruit himself. This courageous decision is another example of Conover's resourceful and practical nature: when cornered, Conover never admitted defeat. He employed a common sense approach to all his problems.
In yet another example of his flexibility and resourcefulness, Conover searched out Joe Puma, the executive director of the New York State guards' union, after his efforts to discuss the prison system was rebuffed by New York state department officials. Conover relished the information that Puma shared with him. According to Puma, corrections officers had the shortest life spans and the highest rates of divorce, alcohol addiction, and heart disease among civil servants. Conover enjoyed the interview sessions, but Puma eventually stopped returning his phone calls.
Determined to pursue more information, Conover got himself invited to the union's "initial bargaining sessions for its new contract with the state." There, he met Rick Kingsley, a union rep who worked at the Washington Correctional Facility in New York. Conover's friendly and unassuming nature led Kingsley to invite him to his prison to observe the conditions, but Conover found the experience sadly lacking in authenticity. This led to his decision to take the corrections officer exam in order to gain admittance to the Albany Training Academy. Throughout these three experiences, Conover used his communication skills, flexibility, and common sense to solve the logistical problems of compiling information about New York's prison systems.
Yet another example of Conover's practical nature can be seen when two inmates from galleries R and W on the second floor played a vicious practical joke on him. One of the inmates called to Conover as he patrolled the floor, while the other made a pretense of landing an uppercut punch on Conover's chin. Neither of the inmates had intended to hurt Conover, but their laughter showed that they had been trying to intimidate him on his first day at the prison. Despite his desire to use his baton, Conover didn't. He reasoned that a baton would have been useless against two burly prisoners; also, he was too slight of build to wield the baton effectively.
Next, he mulled over writing what was called an Inmate Misbehavior Report or "ticket." However, Conover came to the conclusion that writing a "wimpy ticket" would have hurt his chances of receiving real assistance when faced with dire situations in the future. So, he refrained from acting according to his emotions. In this instance, Conover's common sense approach allowed him to stay calm and to keep his courage. In all, Conover exhibited flexibility and exemplary self-possession.
No comments:
Post a Comment