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If you're interested in the strange working relationship between guards and prisoners, I highly recommend Newjack:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newjack:_Guarding_Sing_Sing?w...

The author is a journalist who was refused access to Sing Sing, so he joined the prison service as a guard there for a year.

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I just finished reading that book, and it doesn't sound like the relationship that this blog post implies at all. He said he sympathized with the inmates a bit (and let them break minor rules), but he didn't bring any contraband in.

(And interestingly, the book makes prison sound a lot nicer than I would have imagined. Less rules than the residential high school I went to, anyway...)

No, but he does discover that the guard/prisoner relationship is a lot more complex than he expected, relying for the most part on subtle persuasion and negotiation by the guard not raw coercion. He also show how much time prisoners devote to getting inside their guards' heads, since they often were manipulative and amoral personalities on the outside and now they have nothing else to vent those skills on.

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