Factually! with Adam Conover - Immersion Journalism with Ted Conover

Episode Date: July 15, 2020

Journalist Ted Conover joins Adam to talk about his experience becoming a prison guard to report on Sing Sing Prison, and how his unique form of immersion can help develop empathy in his audience and encourage real change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. And look, if you've listened to the show before, you probably know that my personal mission in life is to understand the world as deeply and richly as I possibly can. That is what gets me out of bed every single morning. And since you're listening to this show, I'm guessing that you feel similarly, that that's a mission for you too. And you know, one of the cool things about our era is that we have more data than we have ever had before about the world. If you're inclined,

you can take an endless array of charts and stats and read them and understand them in order to make sense of our world. But the problem is that numbers are by themselves insufficient to truly understand society and our universe. Because one thing a statistic can never give you is direct insight into another person's life, what it feels like to be them. You know, there's a reason that when Frederick Douglass sought to change American minds about slavery, he didn't just put a bunch of slavery statistics into a spreadsheet, even if spreadsheets had been invented by then. No, he wrote a narrative of the life of an American slave, a book which, if you read it today, conveys a truth about slavery, about that institution that no set

of numbers can ever give you. That's because as great and powerful as facts and figures are, if you can enter the headspace of another person, really understand what their life is like, it changes what you think about that issue forever. It gives you a deeper understanding of a different part of the world. It sounds so cliche, but I swear it is true. And you've probably experienced this yourself. You see an issue differently once you can sort of embody it. When you see that the person living it is not a statistical abstraction or a boogeyman, but someone just as human and fragile as you are, living a life that is just as detailed and nuanced and pressured from every direction

as your life is. That sort of deep understanding can be incredibly important to making change. That sort of deep understanding can be incredibly important to making change. But how do we get it? I mean, we are each of us so, so, so limited. Our lives are so small and so short and so tied to the physical place that we are in, to the close boundary of our own experiences. We barely even live long enough to explore our own lives, let alone the billions of other possible lives that are out there. So how can you understand what it's like to be another person when it's hard enough just getting a handle on yourself? Well, throughout my life, I've been incredibly

lucky to occasionally come across pieces of media that gave me direct insight about what it is like to live as another person. Books, articles, even TV shows and podcasts. For instance, if you're a longtime listener of this show, you might remember Mark Horvath, whose intimate video interviews with people experiencing homelessness were crucial to changing the way I thought about that issue. Or think about prison, for instance. The American prison system is cruel beyond belief, but you won't get that if I just list for you how many millions of people in this country are incarcerated. Well, if you've listened to the podcast Ear Hustle, the host of which we've had on this show, you've heard incarcerated men and women

describe what it is like to live, to be a person behind bars. And I'm willing to bet you never thought about prison the same way again. But what about, say, the life of prison guards? You know, one of the first books I ever read about prison that gave me that insight into this system was a book called New Jack. In that book, a journalist goes undercover as a prison guard at Sing Sing, not just for a week or a month, but for years. And he wrote about what that experience was like, what that job entails, and what it does to the people who do it. And until I read it, I didn't understand that a system of oppression like that can also be a job, with its own array of weird issues and pressures and challenges, and that it's exactly that day-to-day grind that makes the system so impressive.

New Jack, for me personally, was the first piece of media I engaged with that taught me to look at prisons as more than just an institutional abstraction, but as a system inhabited by real people, people like me, people with lives. And that was the moment I started seeing prisons very, very differently. Well, I am proud to say that we have the author of New Jack on the show today. His name is Ted Conover. I know, I know. Look, no relation, at least not that we know of. We get into that in the interview. But for decades, Ted has used a technique which he calls immersive journalism to get inside worlds and make them legible in a way that no one else does. This is true for his writing from Sing Sing Prison, but his journalism has also explored life off the grid in Colorado and the stresses and strains of working on the line at an industrial meat plant. His work is revelatory and incredibly fascinating.

So without further ado, please welcome journalist Ted Conover. Ted, thank you so much for being here. I'm happy to be here. I've been reading your work for years. I need to comment, first of all, you're the first person I've ever interviewed with my same last name. That goes both ways, Adam. You are the first professional Con over I have spoken to.

It's not a common name. No, there are not so many of us out there. And, you know, my family had like a genealogy book. One of my, I don't know, great, great answer. Something wrote this like, you know, did in the 70s, like a big genealogical workup. If we put the time into it, we might find out how we're traceably related. It's that small of a family tree. I have a feeling that we are. I have a relative as well who's really into this, and she has been building out a tree on Ancestry.com for years. And I said, who's that apical ancestor we have? Who's that first

con over? And she said Wolfert Gerritsen van Kouwenhoven. Yeah. Is that the same in your side of the family? The same on my side of the family. And look, people cherry pick their ancestors, right? Because that guy goes so far back. We each have dozens of other

great, great, great, great, great whatevers. But yeah, we must share that one ancestor. Yeah, which is kind of weird. Yeah, real old. I mean, that guy was a real old New Amsterdam Ridge Bucks. Exactly, the early, early arrivals from Europe in Manhattan and Brooklyn and before the English came and did all their bad stuff, the Dutch did. And there we were. Okay. Well, this is my first time interviewing

a distant cousin, but it's funny because whenever I've read your work for years and whenever I'm telling people about your books, I'm reading this incredible book by Ted Conover. We're not that close. I don't know if we're related, but the book is great. It's not about that. I've loved your work for so long because what you do is,

I'm going to paraphrase it, is you do these long form works of journalism where you immerse yourself in the life that you're reporting on. The first book of yours I read was called New Jack about your time. You wanted to understand what it was like in Sing Sing prison and you worked as a prison guard there for three years. Am I right? Just a year. Oh, just a year. Excuse me. And I find that technique so incredible because it does the job that we want like the best media to do, which has really put us mentally in the place of the job that we want the best media to do,

which has really put us mentally in the place of the people that we're trying to understand. I just want to know a little bit, how did you come to that technique and what does it mean to you? This is a great question. I actually did not have a name for it or think it was my way of doing things until, I don't know, 10 years ago or so when a smart professor I work with suggested, you know, this is your thing. This is what you do. And I had always thought, well, I like to do journalism that's very personal.

I'm not afraid of putting myself in the story. I find it unsatisfying when a journalist who was there writes as though they weren't, you know, and leaves out all the personal reactions of fear or excitement or perplexity, all the things that a human being experiences in a new situation. I wanted to be able to include those in writing about bigger topics. So, you know, you can do a five W's kind of interview with somebody, but that doesn't let you talk about your uncle who was a corrections officer or your third cousin who was in prison or, you know, this lets you go to all those places. So I think it makes for better journalism. It makes for more personal journalism. And I like to think it gives readers a way into a topic they might not have gone for otherwise. Like, you know, criminal justice is now the news.

It seems everything every day. But a year ago, three months ago, two months ago, it wasn't. And to get people to think about prison and the problems of our prison system and the problems of mass incarceration when it's not on their minds is not easy because it's not a nice place to go in certain ways. So this is like a method that I hope will bring somebody into the story because they want to see what happens to me. They want to know, how'd you get the idea? And how'd you get that job? And weren't you afraid when you walked in there? And yes, I was afraid. I'm not very macho about it. I wear my heart on my sleeve most of the time, and I want to tell the reader what's in my mind.

So yeah, I've had that impulse for a long time. And then when I was an undergraduate in college, I found anthropology and discovered there's this whole academic discipline sort of devoted to getting inside the heads of people from a different culture than you. And how can you do that? And how much can you do that? What are the limitations? What are the possibilities? And I thought, you know, this is kind of like journalism, but you spend longer. You don't just get on the phone for 10 minutes um or send an email you you go you go eat the food with them and breathe the air and have a conversation and and so i've i've kind of tried to blend those two things together make it a kind of long know, a deeper journalism that matters more. Yeah, I mean, that's what your work has really done for me.

I mean, when I read, I read New Jack over a decade ago now, but it was one of the first works I ever read reporting on mass incarceration. And it was, you know, one of the first, like, it was, for me, a revelatory experience that, like, opened my eyes to what this system was and what it was you know one of the first like it was for me a revelatory experience that like opened my eyes to to what this system was and what it was like and you write not just about hey here's the history of the prison here's the history of incarceration in america here's the numbers here's what it's doing to folks you were able to write about here's what it does to the people who work in part of it who work in the system because you experienced it. And so being able to place myself in that, like, oh, here's what

being a corrections officer does to you. And here's the mentality that the system imposes upon you. Can you just talk a little bit about that project and how you embarked upon it? And yeah, how you talk about it? Yeah, definitely. So when I moved to New York from Colorado, that was in the early 90s. The record numbers of prisoners was making headlines. Like, you know, apartheid South Africa was the only country incarcerating more people than we did. And this was a result of the Rockefeller era drug laws, which had lots of mandatory sentencing provisions that are now widely recognized as racist and, you know, left this horrible legacy of young men, mostly from the city, mostly big cities.

So they're young men of color in prisons, mostly administered by Caucasians outside a city, because most big state prisons are not in the big cities. They're out in the country. And I thought, I want to write about that. And the best books about prison had been written by prisoners as far as I knew. You know, George Jackson and Mumia Abu-Jamal and Eldridge Cleaver and that guy Norman Mailer helped get out of prison, Jack Henry Abbott. Like, these are the great American prison books. And I thought, I don't know if I want to become a prisoner or even if that would make any sense.

And it wouldn't if you could leave every day. But then I thought, because, right, you have to be careful not to pursue some kind of bogus participation where you can pretend to know something. And I think that would be people's first question is, wait, this isn't tourism, is it? You're not just like dipping in and acting as though you understand something about it and then dipping out. You're trying to do a deeper investigation. Well, right. But it's always the first important question to ask, which is how far can you go? And how much can you say you learned? For example, my second book is about a year of travel with undocumented Mexican workers. Yeah, it's a great book. Thank you. No one ever thought I was Mexican. And that certainly includes me and the readers. And

that makes it very easy because there's this line between us that I'm talking about all the time. Mostly I'm trying to erase the line so they're comfortable with me and my Spanish is better and all that. But with prison, I actually did become a corrections officer. I actually did the job. I'm still different from the people I worked with because at any time I could quit. And I did not grow up thinking, if I'm lucky, I'll get a job as a CEO, right? That makes me different. I have a college education. That makes me different.

All these things make me different. That said, if you acknowledge that, then I think you can talk about what you have in common, which is the negative atmosphere of a prison, the fear you have as an officer running a housing unit where you're vastly outnumbered, the way that the color of your uniform makes you act, you can't be, you can't sound empathetic with a prisoner in the presence of other officers or they'll think you're weak. And it goes the same way with prisoners. They can't be too palsy with officers when they're around other prisoners or they'll be suspected of being a rat, you know,

and having some special connection to an officer. So there's all these dynamics that you can figure out, even though you're just a visitor for a few months. And I'm upfront about that. To me, you have to be. You have to level with readers about what they're not going to get from this and then subject yourself to, to some criticism about what, what you actually know and what you don't know.

But at the same time, you're, you didn't, uh, you didn't say, Hey, New York state corrections department, can I pop in for a week and put on the uniform and give it a shot for my for my magazine piece? You took the you took the exams. You did the training. You you did the career path of someone who would be a corrections officer in order to get into it legitimately. I mean, you were working as a full-time corrections officer. That's right.

And I did it to fill in the story that I kind of skipped over. I actually had an assignment from the New Yorker to write about a family of corrections officers upstate. And I needed the state's approval to be able to go to work with them. And I thought just a few days should do it. I could follow them around see what they do just soak it up and they um uh the state wouldn't let me and they said no no we we would never agree to that it's much too dangerous and I'm like what it can't be that dangerous if I'm

especially if I'm with an officer the whole time um I said, I'll sign anything. And they said, no, we can give you one tour at one facility, and that's it. And I thought, well, that's no good, because this is taxpayer money. This is New York State's second largest employer after Verizon at the time was prisons, and the public has a right to know. And that's when I thought I'm justified in getting the job without telling them. So that was the test

I felt I had to pass first is, you know, could I get the story another way? If not, then okay, I'm going to go in secretly. And that, I've got to say, made them pretty mad when they found out. When did they find out? When the book was published? A little bit before, because I did an excerpt for The New Yorker, and their fact checkers called the state to see if I had gotten things right. And they were so mad, they wouldn't talk to them. They said, he didn't get our permission before going in. We're not going to help you publish your article. And I'm like, oh my God, does it have to be like this?

Well, so tell me more about what that experience was and what you learned. So that detail that you said about how putting on the uniform makes you act differently and the sort of social relationship between the corrections officers and the prisoners is something that, yeah, you wouldn't have access to if you weren't personally doing it. We've all had the experience of, like, once you're in a situation for the first time, you realize something about, oh, when I'm in this situation, it makes me behave like this. And I never would have realized that if I hadn't been there. Exactly. Like going to your parents for a holiday, right?

You find you're a different version of yourself than you would otherwise be. Yes. how much you learn about what it's like to work in an office nine to five, you know, until you actually, you know, you can watch as many episodes of The Office as you want, but until you get that job, you're not really going to understand the dynamics at play. And so that's one of the amazing things your work does is it gives you access to those insights. And so I'm curious, what else, you know, what other things like that you learned from that experience? And so I'm curious what other things like that you learned from that experience. So you learn about the culture of the people you're with, and you start doing that in the training academy where they tell you becoming a corrections officer is about three things,

care, custody, and control. You're like, oh, okay, tell me about that. So care, you've got to make sure they're fed. You've got to make sure they don't die if they're sick or wounded. And custody means you're keeping the public safe. You're keeping them under lock and key. And control means they're not pushing you around. You run the jail, not them.

And that's where it gets pretty interesting. Like, oh, wait, I mean, I thought there's rules. Doesn't everybody just follow the rules? And that's how it looks like on TV. And it turns out that, in fact, there's the same kind of discretion in enforcing the rules that you have in any kind of police work, where the traffic cop can ticket you for 10 miles over the speed limit or maybe not. Right. Maybe waits for a worse infraction. And the corrections officer has a zillion factors in mind when she's thinking, OK, this guy won't lock into his cell. He came back from lunch. I've told him twice

respectfully to go in. What do I do? I could push him in. I could shout for help from somebody else. I could threaten him with a ticket, which means he might have a hearing, and he might lose some recreation. What do I do? And you're faced with these decisions every day of how much to assert yourself. And you're always thinking, what happens if he just says, fuck yourself, CEO? What do I do then? And most of them are bigger than me. And so you're also thinking, what if he takes a swing at me? And in fact, on the first day at work, I'm accompanying my training officer. When somebody taps me on the shoulder, I figure it's another officer because inmates aren't allowed to do that.

I turn around. It was an inmate. And he's with his friend. And he swings his fist and stops right under my chin like he was going to knock my block off. And I jumped and probably squeaked and said, oh, Jesus. And he laughed and walked away. And I thought, what just happened? And I'm waiting for the officer I'm with to get upset. And he goes, oh, those assholes. Just ignore them. And in my mind, I'm thinking, oh, that's a violation of 103.7, threats to an officer. And I said, well, what if I write him a ticket? He said, they'll laugh you out of the hearing, Conover, because you weren't hurt.

They get so many tickets. If you weren't hurt. They get so many tickets. If you weren't hurt, they don't care. So you learn there's this whole complicated calculus about how you act and how tough a guy you are. And, you know, when to report things. You find a prisoner who's got contraband. Are you going to report it? Well, if it's crack cocaine, yes. What if it's a stolen heating element from a prison mess hall

that the prisoner can use to heat up food that he buys in the commissary? Should you report that? I thought so. And then three officers told me, no, he's a good guy, Conover. He hates the food, so let him keep it. Then what do you do, right? Because you're the new Jack. You're the guy who doesn't know what's going on. So you take their cue. And with George Floyd, I was thinking when I learned that Chauvin was a training officer who had in fact trained at least one of those guys he was with when he killed George Floyd, I thought, whoa, that gives him a lot of power over them

because they look to him for what is appropriate. And clearly, anybody who watches that can see it was completely inappropriate, but you're in their thrall and you are being indoctrinated and it gets complicated. no matter what the regulations are, you're always going to listen to the more experienced person has your job. No, no, don't listen to that. Here's how we actually do things. Right. That's always going to be more powerful to you. Right. And you also write about how frightened corrections officers are and the numerical disadvantage, to put it one way, and how that I think about I think about that all the time, especially as relates to, you know, talking about police violence and police officers, because I've also read that that police officers are constantly afraid and that that is it does not excuse the violence. Right. But it's the reason for it and that that's the deeper dynamic at play, especially especially that you know police officers there are so many guns in america they're constantly worried that everyone they talk to has

a gun at all times which is not the case in other countries uh and i've always found that a really fascinating argument um but that there's a similar psychology in our in our prisons can you talk about that at all yeah well what you were just saying about feeling scared is the reason behind violent actions. That is true some of the time. I think a lot of officers feel that there's a balance of power in a prison that's kind of reset every day. in a prison that's kind of reset every day. Like today, the inmates are acting up. They are resisting here, here, and here. And it's going to take some tough officers to change that, right, and to make them respect us.

And so there's this big gray area just around that, around how much are you going to assert yourself and your power? And I admit to being frightened. A lot of my colleagues would not admit to being frightened, I don't think, because it's kind of like you have to project confidence and act like whatever order you give is going to be followed. And the minute you look scared, like, will you go into your cell, please? Like, the minute you take that approach, you're lost. And the whole, they'll laugh at you. And they were already laughing at me.

They called me Barney Fife because I'm not a big guy. I got to say, that's pretty, that's pretty funny. That's as bad as it gets. Who wants to be called Barney? And this one guy in particular who had some mental thing going on one afternoon just kept shouting it barney barney and it was like my nightmare but a more typical nightmare all all kidding aside is that um you get taken hostage and that is um described in the in the training academy as yeah the worst thing that could possibly happen because you might be killed you might just be raped you might have fingers cut off all these terrible traumas could happen to you you know scores get settled when there's a prison uprising and um and what and my sergeant when I got to Sing Sing had all these circles, these scars from cigarette burns on his

forearms. And there was debate among the New Jacks, whether he got those in Vietnam where he'd been a POW, or whether he got those in Sing Sing where he was taken hostage a month after he became an officer. Wow. And yeah, I mean, so that's, that is the fear that you are locked in there like they are, and you could lose control. And I think for a beat officer on the street, it's not, you know, it's not quite that intense in some ways. There are nice people you come into contact with as a regular police officer. And I've got to say, a lot of the people I met as a CO seem nice enough. But there's so much potential for violence. And yeah, you're afraid.

You want to get home in one piece and go see your family at the end of the day. And a lot of people worry about that. The picture you paint is of prison as this almost daily battleground, like this system that's structured and almost to create this violent conflict between the incarcerated folks and the officers in a way. I'm curious, how did you feel about, look, reading the book, you are not a fan of the carceral state of mass incarceration. Reading your work is the first place that I encountered

my dawning awareness of like mass incarceration as our, as our great national sin. Um, I'm curious how you felt being a part of it, right. Being a part of the system, uh, even for a little while. Uh, and yeah, what that, what that does to you. So that's a really, really good question. Let me tell you, I had a neighbor who, when my book came out, said he wouldn't read it. And I had known him to be a political progressive. And I said, I think you might find you like it. He said, no, I teach reading at Sing Sing. I find what you did immoral. And that really made me think. To me, as a citizen of a country that incarcerates people, we're all complicit in the fact of this prison. And I don't think I am more so for getting my hands dirty to learn what it's like.

I kind of think if more people knew what it was like, the system would change because they wouldn't stand for it, for the waste of human resources and financial resources. Like the word needs to get out what this place is, what it's like, what it does to prisoners, what it does to the people who work there. And so to me, I am keeping it real by putting myself there and seeing, sure, I went to college, but could I do a good job as a corrections officer? And I can't tell you how many times I thought this would be easier if I had not gone to college. Like, I'd stop asking questions about how each guy got here. I'd stop, you know, thinking in terms of the big picture, and I just turned my brain into little boxes that dealt with whatever I had to, to finish my shift.

But no, I came into it trying to think about the big picture and, and what it means to work in a prison. And is it immoral to do that? I don't think so. I think it's more, I think that's a very simplistic moral calculus. I think it's moral not to work to change a bad system. And I think of what I did as a kind of activism. Well, I have so many more questions about your other projects, but we got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more from my long lost cousin, Ted Conover. Okay.

So we're back with Ted. Ted, another book of yours that I read was called Coyotes, which is, you wrote in 1987. It's about illegal immigration, which is, that's a very different time in America's history. Like, that issue has changed so much in America. The way we enforce it has changed. But I still, I found it so revelatory because you you cross the border with folks who are trying to get into America using the coyote system.

Right. Folks who are who illegally smuggle people across the border. And you also correct me if I'm wrong, worked for a time in like fruit picking in the sort of in the fields with folks who are doing migrant labor. And I wonder if you can talk about that experience a bit and what you learned about about the folks who are actually doing this. Coyotes came to me when I was riding freight trains around the country for my first book called Rolling Nowhere, which is a retelling of my college ethnography research. I wrote an ethnography of railroad tramps, and it was really my first immersion experience. Of like folks who are riding the rails, Hobo's Lullaby, that lifestyle. Right. So that's the classic Hobo is the Depression era. You get various waves since then.

Since then, and, you know, part of the scene in the 80s when I did it was undocumented workers who would travel that way to avoid being seen by police or border patrol. So I met those guys. Well, they weren't the main people I was hanging out with, I was hanging out with a sort of high functioning homeless cohort that would still go from town to town on freight trains and stay in rescue missions and get food stamps in more than one state. And they had these various fascinating survival strategies. But I met Mexicans and thought, wow, this would be a great group of people to get to know better. And so that it was like when I realized they would talk to me with my Denver Public School Spanish and, you know, they they wouldn't shy from me and they were curious about me. I thought this this could be really interesting to hang out with them. It was like a door opened into a much bigger building than the one I'd been in. the one I'd been in. And so, yeah, I started work with a farm workers group outside Phoenix that believed you could organize undocumented people on these citrus ranches,

all these irrigated orange, grapefruit and lemon groves on the edge of Phoenix. And gosh, I worked as long as I could, could adam but i think it was like two to three weeks and i was so pathetic i um it's hard work picking oranges it's hard they're heavy and you have to go up and down a ladder and and then they tell you you're picking lemons today and lemons are the worst because you have to clip those with this clipper that you tape to your hand and in a single motion you clip and grab the lemon and a sack full of lemons weighs about twice as much as a sack full of oranges and your hand gets so sore and i picked as fast as i could and it was half as fast as these guys from Mexico

who thought it was hilarious how weak and undisciplined I was. Yeah, I really took that. The thing, one of the big things I, you know, the insight that never left me from the book, I think it's really interesting, by the way, because I read a lot of nonfiction and I think it's interesting

which facts and images stick with you years later. It's always like one or two flashbulbs. And the one that stuck with me is you writing about the incredible pain in your hand from the repetitive stress injury, basically doing this over and over again. And then the idea that we talk about this kind of labor as though this is labor Americans could be doing and that it's unskilled labor. could be doing and that it's unskilled labor. And what you describe as no, this is skilled labor that has historically in the United States, basically only been done by migrant Mexicans who are trained and skilled at it.

And it's not like there's no, there's no big body of, you know, of Americans of American citizens who like are going to rush the fields and do this because it's such difficult, skilled work. Right. And if you're good at it, you have a talent. Can I tell you a similar, I love that you remember those moments,

those flashbulb moments there's one from about two miles from a an orchard i was working in i went home with one of the uh union organizers and we were watching the evening news and it was a time of do you you remember Farm Aid and Willie Nelson raising money for people losing their farms? And I was watching the evening news with a group of migrant farm workers, and they showed a farm being auctioned off. And it had a bunch of big John Deere tractors. tractors. And the story was about, you know, this carnage in the heartland of the country, all these foreclosures. And he goes, those people aren't poor. Look at those tractors. And I said, well, they might not own all those tractors. And after the auction, they sure won't. He goes, but they weren't poor before the, you know, he said they were living well. Look how we live. And it kind of puts things in perspective.

Yeah. Yeah, that was true suffering. To lose a family farm is a horrific thing. But then you see that the scale goes down a bit lower. And the railroad hobos I traveled with have this hierarchy where you you're a tramp if you travel and you work but if you travel and don't work you're always you're only a hobo and i said oh so a mexican would be a tramp and they said no no a mexican is is below a mexican is a mexican and i hadn't even, you know,

that's like in a whole different universe in their brain. So it, I don't know, spending time in these worlds is like traveling to other places. And yet they're, they're, they're next door in many cases, right? They're, they're right here. And I have the privilege of an education and a family background where I could learn how to write and can take some of these chances. Coyotes was the most fun of any of the books I've written. And it's because the guys I was with were my age. We're all single. Most of them. You partied.

We drank a lot of beer after work. And they would want to meet girls. And, you know, but then they'd mess up, too. And things would go wrong. They'd get deported. They'd try again. They'd come back. And it was like, you know, and they looked out for me,

which a lot of the tramps and hobos hadn't really done. And they were, you know, they weren't veterans. Like who's this guy with a notebook? Yeah, let him take his chances. No, they're like, oh, yeah, we got to watch out for him because, you know, he could run into trouble. So anyway, that was a pretty great adventure. Well, I do want to ask because because you mentioned the privilege that you have and I share a lot of that same privilege.

A lot of the folks and experiences that you're writing about are, you know, people who are from more marginalized communities. uh, you know, people who are from more marginalized communities. Um, you know, you're writing about prison, obviously hugely overrepresented, uh, black Americans, people of color. Um, and I'm sure the same is, uh, the case in the, in the guards to some extent, uh, you're writing about folks crossing the border from Mexico. I also want to talk about, uh, you were, uh, uh, uh, FDA meat inspector, um, which, uh, I want to talk about that were a FDA meat inspector, which I want to talk about that project as well. But also, similarly, that's a lot of nonwhite folks doing that. And, you know, you're you're writing about it as a college educated white guy here. I am a college educated white college educated white guy.

We're both talking about it. And I'm like, wow, thank you for giving me an insight into these worlds. But there's a slight bit of discomfort there about, you know, I guess the question I'd ask is, like, why do you feel that you have to tell these stories? Why aren't these folks able to tell these stories themselves? You know, I'm not saying that you don't bring your own unique perspective to it, but there is a dynamic there that I'm curious what thought you've put into so i think the best situation is a multiplicity of stories and and never counting on the the white person's version to be the version especially when it comes to depicting the experience of a uh you know an oppressed and underrepresented group. You cannot have the white people defining that reality.

That said, when you come in from the outside, you have a perspective that can add to a general understanding of a situation. Look at prison. The night I gave a reading of my book in the Ossining Public Library, a whole bunch of officers came. I was so afraid they were going to beat me up. And one of them came up to me afterwards and said, yeah, your book sounds like it might be okay, but I could write a really good book about prison.

And I said, okay, tell me about that. He said, well, I've been here 26 years. And I'm like, okay, well, you would write a different book. I bet after 26 years, prison seems kind of normal to you. And to me, it seems so weird and messed up. And that's why I call it New Jack, because it's about being a rookie. And when you're fresh, these things jump out. So yeah, you don't want to colonialize a cultural experience. But I do think it's legit to add to the conversation, to use my experience

to bear a kind of witness about other experiences that are not well known. And, you know, you're talking about how much has changed with immigration since the mid-80s. That's also really true with journalism. And I'm not sure things have changed for the better with immigration, but I think in many crucial ways they have with journalism because there's never been a greater awareness of the the blinders that that we bring to this as members of a privileged majority and never such a push to make to to make that better to, to make room for other voices. So, um, so yeah, I think, uh, if you're studying the history of immigration, I hope you'll, you'll check out coyotes, but there's a whole lot of other books, um, uh, that you should also read.

If you're, if you're reading about mass incarceration, you should probably start with The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. But I hope you'll take a look at New Jack because it goes somewhere else and it talks about the people who are part of this whole misbegotten system, who are, you know, doing their 20 years on eight-hour shifts and who have to be counted in when you're figuring out how to reform it. when you're figuring out how to reform it. Like, you know, a big problem, I think, and I don't know if you want to go in this direction,

but American law enforcement has this image of a person in uniform who carries a weapon and is all about being ready to use it. And in European prisons, the officers not only sort of mind the rules, but they teach some of the classes because they know how to read. They can teach somebody how to read. They know math. Because they know how to read. They can teach somebody how to read. They know math. They have more to offer than just the ability to use force. The solution to everything is not 911, which summons the police, but maybe which involves a whole range of trained people who might help in different ways and who don't have this machismo around their firearms. I'm sorry.

I don't usually start us sermonizing. No, I mean, it's the right, it's the right time to do it. And yeah, I mean, your perspective is the outsider perspective is an interesting one because you have the ability to be surprised by what you find in a way that is like relatable to an audience who is also ignorant. Does that make sense? I think what it is is that you go on a journey from ignorance to understanding. And so for the part of the audience, which is, you know, often includes me, who is also ignorant about the topic, I, you know, I relate to that experience and I'm brought through on that versus someone who's, you know, living it every day. There's like, it's a useful way to walk through it.

And that I think is one of the, it's one of the great challenges of journalism is how to explain something to an intelligent lay person without dumbing it down, right? You want to explain the nuance, but you don't want it to be too complicated. And I often, this will sound strange perhaps, but I often think, could my mom understand what I'm talking about here? I'm describing a meat plant, Cargill Meat Solutions in Schuyler, Nebraska, and I'm putting a lamb knife into livers and hearts and passing it down to the next guy. And, you know, I want her to picture it

and understand the whole cultural surround. And so, yeah, that is where I come in. And it's kind of, it's perpetually 101,on-one, right? It's, it's a, it's an introduction. It's an introduction. Yeah. In my work, I often imagine, uh, like myself as a 15 year old sitting in front of the television or, or another, you know, like white 15 year old stupid kid watching and trying to think, is this going to strike? Is the material I'm giving them going to shock and engage them and make them

go, Oh, holy shit. I had no idea. Right. Yeah. And I always try to be aware, Hey,

there's probably other people, especially when we're talking about something like criminal justice, right? There's a lot of people who aren't going to be shocked by this story because they live it already, you know, and let's make sure we're not excluding those folks from the conversation. But also our goal right here is to try to make other people wake up to this. And that is something that I feel like I felt like before

as like a white man covering these issues is something that I can something that I can bring because I was born in a state of ignorance about it. And I had to go through that awakening and I can bring that awakening to other folks. I don't know if that makes sense at all. It does. You know, another risk of what I do is I don't want to preach to the choir. So I want to write a book about corrections work that my fellow officers are going to read and say, well, that's true. He tells it like it is.

And yeah, I did feel like punching that guy in the face. I didn't do it, but that is how I felt. And I want them to say he didn't make that up. to say he didn't make that up. And at the same time, I want somebody who could never imagine that situation where you want to punch somebody in the face like that, being a little horrified, but staying with me and not faulting me for sharing some of my negative emotions. faulting me for sharing some of my negative emotions. Like there's a day in New Jack where I get punched in the side of my head after I yell at a prisoner who has committed a lewd act in

front of a female trainee who was on my floor. And I got so mad at him that I lost my temper and yelled. And that got everybody on the floor yelling at me because, as other officers put it, you're like their TV. And the TV had suddenly gone off. And one guy kept taunting me whenever I passed. And he was using a mirror, which against the rules, he had left on the bars of his cell. So I grabbed it. And like the third time by. But I was going the wrong way. I planned poorly.

I should have grabbed it going the other direction. So I would not have to return that way. I planned poorly. I should have grabbed it going the other direction so I would not have to return that way. When I returned, he reached out and slugged me behind the ear, knocked me forward, spit on me. I was fine. I had to call the sergeant, the same one with the scars. Sergeant says to me, Conover, what you're describing doesn't make any sense. And I said, no, I know, Sarge. I shouldn't have lost my temper. He goes, no, no. When the inmate reached through the bars to punch you, why didn't you grab his arm and break it?

And I said, oh, my God. I said, I thought of it too late, Sarge. And swear to God, that is true. That is true. And that is not the best me speaking. But I had been sucker punched, basically. He had a pretty good reason for it, maybe. But I was mad.

And that is how I felt. And I think I also share that as I drove home that day, I imagined that whole building catching fire. Like I hated those people who made fun of me and yelled at me. And it took about a month to realize that much more than the little sore spot on my skull, that feeling was the wound I suffered. That negative feeling toward people I didn't even know. And that's the great risk of a certain kind of criminal justice approach is you're going to go out there feeling negatively about people you don't know. And I think it's one of the biggest challenges of if we're going to have police, how do you keep them from getting in that frame of mind?

Yeah. And writing about that frame of mind journalistically helps us And writing about that frame of mind journalistically helps us understand that problem in a more personal way than we normally have access to, I feel. That you were able to write about, hey, this was my reaction and I'm not happy about it, but this is what's done to you by this system. Yeah, and truly that's how i felt and you know i could let's say you're my you're my buddy and i i meet you for a beer after work and i tell you that story i'm still gonna feel mad it's gonna take a while before i have any distance on it and um so anyway this is why when people say there's the whole debate everybody's happening having right now about uh you know uh uh you know uh are there bad cops you know good cops bad cops bad apples all that sort of thing and my view is based on reading work like yours that like it's the the system

makes people act that way like you could take almost anybody and put them in that situation and they're going to react in ways that are violent and that are harmful and that are abusive to whether we're talking about whether we're talking about you know prison or policing uh like that you know and i learned that in in a lot of ways through your work, that the system does that to people. It does that to anyone who cannot muster their better self when they need to, right? Because I really think for a lot of law enforcement officers, it's this constant struggle to keep your better self alive and not give in to the desire to solve things with violence. And you see probably 100 reasons a day why you could think reductively about the world and not in terms of human potential. You know, you're not often working

with nice, or sometimes you're not working with nice people. But a lot of times you are, even in prison, and you need to be able to respond to them with humanity. And we need a system that lets you do that. Well, so let's talk a little bit more about journalism. Earlier, you said that there's more of a recognition in journalism that, you know, more marginalized folks need to be represented. I know those conversations are still ongoing. Both The New York Times and L.A. Times right now are having like reckonings in their newsrooms about that issue. But journalism in the time that you've worked in it has also shrunk as a as an industry. You know, our producer, Sam, who I was talking about our interview to prepare for it and has

worked in journalism, said, you know, in the time that you've been working on it, you know, we've gone from and I don't know the figures. This is what he said. Twenty dollars a word for magazine articles to a dollar. Right. That that like the the you know, the the big, you know, hey, Vanity Fair might have some pieces. We still have the New Yorker that's still around. But, you know, the outlets for the type of journalism that you do have, a lot of them have have disappeared. And you're in a position where you're you teach journalism, correct? Yes, I do. disappeared. And you're in a position where you teach journalism, correct? Yes, I do. And you're teaching folks how to do this at a time when there's less and less outlets available to do it. And I wonder how you reconcile those things.

So yeah, the vast majority of news around journalism is bad. The business model has collapsed over the last 20 years as the internet has grown and as things have become free. And a whole generation of really talented journalists have found themselves unemployed. And it's not done. I mean, I'm now writing about a part of southern Colorado which has a newspaper. I've watched them try to cover a story in recent days of a shooting. They just don't have any experienced reporter to do that. And as you were saying, the money associated with it has,

has plummeted. Um, some of the good news is the rise of podcasts, uh, which do, do provide some employment and, and, uh, and a great new way of conveying urgent information. And then, yeah, a whole discussion about the ways in which newsrooms do and do not speak for the people in them and the people who should be the audience. And as you were saying, like at the New York Times, audience. And as you were saying at the New York Times, these discussions run right up against questions of, you know, what does it mean to be even-handed in this situation? What does it mean to, you know, is any semblance of objectivity even possible if the executive office doesn't care about factuality. There's just so much at stake, so much in the conversation right now. You can focus on the loss, which we should, but it's also more and more,

it's looking like the slate, all these parts of the slate are being wiped clean and waiting for new ideas to arise and new ways to do things. So I hope that's not Pollyannish to think good things might come out of some of the bad stuff happening now. good things might come out of some of the bad stuff happening now. Well, I mean, I think they'll, you know, we will always have demand for for well-told, you know, deeply reported perspectives. The question is, you know, will we where where's the infrastructure that supports them? You know, podcasts have supported them for a few years,

but also we've we've been in the Wild West days of podcasts for the last 10 years. And we're about to get into the, you know, corporate contraction, uh, where, you know, who knows five years from now, will it be possible to get an audience for a podcast or make money at a podcast that isn't getting a development deal from Spotify, right? Yep. exactly. Like, will a show like Serial, right, which I'm sure, well, I have my quibbles with that show, but, you know, as a work of like, wow, big journalism that made waves and like probably made a lot of money

and created a whole, you know, industry in its wake. Like, is that something that'll be possible in five years is sort of unclear. But, you know, the, yeah, I mean, I think the demand will be there. It's just a question of, will the, the infrastructure that allows you to do it at a large scale be, be possible? I mean, you, you, you had the advantage of most, a lot of the, a lot of your projects, you're at least getting a job. You're working in a meat processing plant. You're working in a, like, so you're subsidizing at the very least.

So that's not a coincidence either, because I couldn't afford to do it otherwise for a long time. I had other jobs. I was an apartment manager. I was a Stanley Kaplan SAT instructor. I taught aerobics, Adam, back in the day. I was going to say you look extremely fit. I should have been lifting heavy weights. It might have served me better. But moving to New York was about the scariest thing I ever did because I just thought there's no way I'm going to be able to support myself. And I only did because magazines were paying better at the time and because my partner had medical insurance through her job. And I don't know a thing.

I imagine it's even harder now to scrape out a living as an independent journalist. So something as small as that, sort of micro-journalism working on freelance assignments and scraping together an income, it's super hard. And I would love in so many ways to find a way to pay a living wage to the large numbers of talented and idealistic people who want to pursue this profession. Yeah. What has doing this kind of journalism meant to you personally? I mean, you, you, if you look back on your life,

you've spent a lot of time in other people's shoes more than most of us have had the opportunity to. And I wonder if that gives you any broader perspective. I like to think I've grown as a result. I like to think it's stretched me in a way that's ultimately good and helpful and has allowed me to empathize more and know more. But it's not just that. You can lose your way with some of these projects. Like just when I was telling you about the bad feelings I had after I got slugged, and it can bring out a side of you that's not a good one. My wife always says when I was a CO, it brought out my

interdisciplinarian. Like I started treating the kids worse because I wanted to be respected. I wanted to be obeyed. And she's totally right. You know, I look back now and think I would never be like that again. But I kind of think some of these lessons, I like to think overall it's been a plus. But each time it's accompanied by little setbacks where I have to regroup and figure out who I am and what I'm here for. I kind of think my identity has been this rubber band. has been this rubber band. And I've kept looking for ways to stretch it out a little more to encompass that reality or this person's experience. And I like to think it snaps back in a coherent way.

But I don't think rubber bands always snap back in a coherent way. They stretch a little bit. They stretch, and it's not always right they stretch a little bit they stretch and it's not always perfect so i'm still that's a work in progress uh what do you uh what do you tell your students about what you do and and why you do it or how do you try to get them energized about about this topic i mean i assume you teach other things about journalism as well, but you, I, I also assume that, that this technique must, must be in there somewhere. Yeah. So I, a lot of them want to know about immersion reporting. What does that mean? Ethnography, what does that mean? How do you do that? What's it good for? And,

and I like to, I try, I like trying to teach that i like sending students out to engage with the world and they find amazing things i would never have dreamed of i think three years ago one of my students was part of the founding of a new group at NYU for people who were asexual or aromantic, and they called themselves Aces and Arrows. And I'm like, wait, they're willingly asexual? Like, I was... Yeah, this is a, this is a identity. This is... Right. But I was ignorant. ignorant, and she enlightened me. And that happens multiple times a semester, especially, I think, as you get into your 60s where I am. The world keeps changing in these fantastic, incredible ways, and you need people like that to bring you along so i often feel i'm

i'm the one benefiting from a lot of this um wow uh and i do feel like by training students to do reporting i'm i'm a mastermind sending my agents into far precincts of the city to ride with the lesbian bikers. Yeah, they're always going unexpected places, and they are always teaching me about it. And I try to help them express themselves clearly and accessibly so that a person who does not have any idea what they're talking about will get it by the end and it strikes me that you know the value of this is that uh of your work and and other journalists i love reading is that uh they bring you these parts of the world that you otherwise wouldn't have access to like that if it if it, you know, journalism is about making the,

I'm sorry, I don't mean to, you're a fucking journalism professor. I'm sorry. Go for it. No, journalism is about, I'm going to tell you. Help me out. Okay. We need help these days.

It's about like making the, making reality visible to us and calling it out. Like we're all limited in our own perspectives. Like I've been fucking trapped in my house for four months now, only experiencing my couple blocks in Los Angeles and my own, looking through my

own eyes. Journalism is about noticing events that are happening in the world that other people need to know about and making them visible and bringing them to them. And, you know, it's really cool to hear you having that same experience from your students, because that is the purpose, right? Is to go find these things and bring them

to light. Yeah. I've often thought if I ever wrote a memoir and they're looking for artwork for the cover, I'd suggest one of those Petzl headlamps that lasts forever and lets you see in the dark and lightweight. You forget it's there. But yeah, I want to be that person. Well, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show to talk to us about it. And thank you for all the reading you've given me over the years. And yeah, I hope folks check out your work and dive in.

Maybe we'll meet at a family reunion in North Carolina or Ohio one of these days. Oh, I think Ohio sounds about right. So we should maybe trace that back. I believe I have heard about a family reunion in Ohio. I think some of our people are there. Okay, if we get any deeper into this, we're gonna open ourselves up to identity theft. So we gotta cut it off there.

Thank you so much, Ted. Thanks, Adam. I don't know anything. Well, thank you so much, Ted. Thanks, Adam. Well, thank you once again to Ted Conover for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with my perhaps long lost cousin as much as I did. That is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank our producers, Dana Wickens and Sam Roudman, our engineers, Brett Morris and Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song. You can find me online at adamconover.net or at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media. If you like the show, please leave us a rating or subscription. It really, really, really helps us out. So if you could just hit that button, go over to the iTunes or Google

or wherever you get it and give us a five star, just tap out a little review. I would really appreciate it so much. And until next week, we'll see you next time on factually thanks so much for listening that was a hate gum podcast