American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

Shane Bauer

Sep 2018 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” —NPR.org

New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018 * One of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2018 * Winner of the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize * Winner of the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism * Winner of the 2019 RFK Book and Journalism Award * A New York Times Notable Book 

A ground-breaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in America: in one Louisiana prison and over the course of our country's history.

In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background check. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough, and in short order he wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award and became the most-read feature in the history of the magazine Mother Jones. Still, there was much more that he needed to say. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. For, as he soon realized, we can't understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery, and the echoes of these shameful origins are with us still.

The private prison system is deliberately unaccountable to public scrutiny. Private prisons are not incentivized to tend to the health of their inmates, or to feed them well, or to attract and retain a highly-trained prison staff. Though Bauer befriends some of his colleagues and sympathizes with their plight, the chronic dysfunction of their lives only adds to the prison's sense of chaos. To his horror, Bauer finds himself becoming crueler and more aggressive the longer he works in the prison, and he is far from alone.

A blistering indictment of the private prison system, and the powerful forces that drive it, American Prison is a necessary human document about the true face of justice in America.

Ratings and reviews

What do you know about the prison system in the US? Likely whatever you’ve seen in the crime TV shows in recent years. If that’s it, you know almost nothing. Shane Bauer takes us behind the scenes into one of the prisons run by the nation’s first and largest private prison company, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, renamed CoreCivic after the publishing of the articles that later resulted in this book). Maybe you didn’t know that many states outsource part of the prison operation to private companies. Yes, even this is private enterprise. Bauer also reviews the history of prisons as a form of punishment or correction going back to our earliest history and how “correction” evolved from a desire to correct bad behavior and provide possibilities for life after prison into a profit-making enterprise for states. We’ve heard of chain gangs. Many states earned a significant portion of their budget, both by using prisoners to do menial labor for the state and hiring out prison crews to companies to build railroads, mine coal, or clear land for crops. Shortly after the Civil War ended, prisons in many southern states became just a form of slavery by another name with African Americans the majority of prisoners and entire prisons' inmates rented out as a captive work force. Often overlooked is that doing so depressed wages for unskilled free labor so much that it held back their own economy and made it difficult for lower-level laborers to earn enough to support a family. Bauer intertwines the two themes throughout the book. To learn more about the CCA, he went undercover, getting a job at a CCA prison in Louisiana in 2016, carrying a recording device concealed in a pen. He found that one problem was that the low pay of $9 per hour was not enough to attract guards who would take the job seriously and the high-turnover rate is what made CCA hire him with only a cursory look into his background. Those guards who did stay were tempted to supplement their income through smuggling illegal goods into the prison. Bauer himself is tasked with training cadets less than seven weeks after taking the job. The book is full of detailed descriptions of the situation in the prison, with short-staffing, cell doors that can be opened by inmates, and almost nonexistent medical care. He describes a dozen stabbings and far more use-of-force incidents than at state run prisons. He records guards describing how they beat inmates outside the view of cameras, trained bloodhounds using inmates, routinely neglected their jobs, and falsified records. He describes a suicide and one death of an inmate who was denied medical care because it would have required taking him to a hospital at CCA’s expense. One inmate was held for a year after he was eligible for release, the excuse being that he could provide no specific address in Louisiana that would take him in, while refusing him any contact with outside services that would have helped him make the arrangements. The company earned an additional $12,410 from the state by keeping him. Bauer used and preserved the recordings made over his 4 months of employment as documentation for the book. He is able to relate incidents in great detail with conversations quoted word for word. The result is a book that is riveting as well as shocking. Many inmates are in for lower-level offenses and know that they have done wrong. But the inhuman treatment that they receive, the boredom of nothing to do, and little opportunity for training or education almost guarantees that there is no “correction” or rehabilitation, but only hardening and humiliation with a complete loss of self-esteem. If that is true in state-run prisons, how can it not be even more so in for-profit prisons who had to bid far lower than the person/day cost of a state prison to get a contract. They can only earn a profit by cutting more corners, taking more risks, and paying staff as little as possible. The prisoners pay, but ultimately, it’s society that really covers the tab. A very good book that should be read.

Honest lorisk into the current and past history of privately run prisons.

About the author

Shane Bauer is a senior reporter for Mother Jones. He is the recipient of the National Magazine Award for Best Reporting, Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, Atlantic Media's Michael Kelly Award, the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism, and at least 20 others. Bauer is the co-author, along with Sarah Shourd and Joshua Fattal, of a memoir, A Sliver of Light, which details his time spent as a prisoner in Iran.