My (Short) Time in the Big House

 I’ll start with a confession. I spent time at Sing Sing Prison and Rikers Island in the 1980s.

You may be thinking, “Wow, this bald Jewish guy in his 60s who works for an accounting firm must have been a real bad-ass back in the day. Either that or he was a criminal defense attorney.”

I’m afraid to say I’m not now, nor have I ever been, a jail-qualifying bad-ass. Maybe a dumb-ass at critical junctures of life. I’ve never been an attorney. No, back in the 80s I was a trade magazine reporter.

Writing for trade magazines lacks the name recognition and glamor of writing for a big-city newspaper or The New Yorker. I toiled for niche publications like Drycleaners News, The Business of Fur,  Leather Today, Banks in Insurance Report, and Magazine Age. Still, this line of work gave me entrée to Sing Sing and Rikers.

In 1984 I was writing for Quick Frozen Foods. My assignment: write about frozen food at the Big House, Sing Sing Correctional Facility. That sounded fun. The headline was “Frozen Fare Gives Prison Chefs Something to ‘Sing-Sing’ About.” That punderful headline practically wrote itself.

Staff at Sing Sing gave me very clear instructions on how to get there from the Ossining train station a half-mile away. I arrived, signed in, was frisked, then went with my notepad and camera to get that story. The highly cooperative foodservice team gave me a lot of great detail on their operations. Nutrition director John Caserta took pride in his operation to feed 2,230 men with a professional staff of 11 and 130 inmate workers, along with 14 security officers. Consistency is the key, as one official with Bureau of Prisons said of the realities of prison life: “In a pure socialistic society, everybody has what everyone one else has. With any differences a black market grows.” So prisoners at the Allenwood “country club prison and the lifers at Leavenworth in Kansas” get the same grub.

Sgt. Leander McCall Jr., head of foodservice security made a big impression. I described him as “an imposing man with a handshake like a vise, he brooks no foolishness.” Caserta described him as “the motivator.” My impression: dedicated people kept the place working. I also learned the first rule of prison foodservice. And that is (drum roll please):

“Don’t run out of food.” Hungry customers are unhappy customers, especially in a penitentiary.

Four years after Sing Sing, I had my adventure at Rikers. By then I was the East Coast Editor of Video Store magazine, covering what was then the thriving video retailing industry before Blockbuster obliterated the industry and then Netflix crushed Blockbuster and most of the remaining video stores.

While Sing Sing was enjoyable, Rikers was epic. I joined the press group invited to Rikers when rap group Public Enemy performed at Rikers, an event every bit as historic as Johnny Cash’s concert at Folsom Prison. The performance was being filmed as part of a music video. Public Enemy was the first group to every play at Rikers, and they came loaded with songs that instantly connected with the audience: Don’t Believe the Hype, Bring the Noise and the classic Fight the Power.

I can’t find any articles I wrote about Rikers, but I did make a laconic note in my journal on August 14, 1988. The was after I returned, exhausted, from the big video industry convention in Las Vegas. I wrote, “Friday wasn’t much of a day off. I went to Rikers for the Public Enemy gig. That turned into an all-day romp in the heat of a prison and I didn’t return here until 5:15.”

The best summary of the event is the 2013 article “Public Enemy at Rikers: An Oral History.”

Lindsey Williams came up with the idea for the show. The then 22-year-old Def Jam executive was putting together a marketing plan for the group’s sophomore album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. PE was on Run-DMC’s Tougher Than Leather tour, and Williams, who was traveling with the group, proposed that they visit and perform at prisons in selected cities. . .

Planning the show took just over a week; the paperwork was expedited by a tangential relationship between members of PE’s camp and the Rikers staff. Turkkan arranged for two buses to transport 150 members of the press from midtown Manhattan to Rikers . . .

The press arrived at Rikers before noon. They were patted down, taken on a brief tour, and then ushered into a small room. Security was minimal, with the only restriction being that press refrain from asking the prisoners what they were in for.

Two hundred and fifty prisoners, most of them black and Latino, entered the bare-bones auditorium. Even by August-in-NYC standards it was brutally hot and the prisoners’ jumpsuits were drenched in sweat. In keeping with protocol there were two guards per inmate with an additional 25 to 30 guards outside the auditorium, and additional officers from other houses on alert. The press stood behind barricades and formed a horseshoe on the perimeter of the crowded room a few feet away from the inmates who were seated in plastic chairs.

Yes, I remember the heat, the earsplitting noise, the tough-as-nails Rikers guards and the holding pen for us reporters, who stuck out like pale sore thumbs in our natty sports jackets and penny loafers.

I now work in communications for a professional services firm. While that’s highly satisfying and has lasted as long as all my magazine gigs taken together, I still look back fondly to the unpredictable zest of writing for the trades. I never knew what I'd find on my plate. And that's something to sing about.