They fret less about what punishment does to convicts than about what it does to the rest of us. Conover's Newjack , published last year, is the more powerful by far of the two, the most gripping jail book I've read since Dead Man Walking . After New York corrections officials denied him access to state penitentiaries because he was a journalist, Conover decided to explore prison the hard way, by becoming a guard. He worked there for one dismal year. Most great prison books depict jail from the point of view of the inmate.
Jailers are faceless, cruel, and distant.
Newjack is exactly the opposite, showing jail only from the jailer's perspective. Prisoners are strangely absent from Conover's book about prison. That is the point. As far as COs are concerned, prisoners really are little more than furniture. They rarely speak, except to curse out a guard or lie or hallucinate.