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    American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment
    Unavailable
    American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment
    Unavailable
    American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment
    Audiobook10 hours

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

    Written by Shane Bauer

    Narrated by James Fouhey

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 18, 2018
    ISBN9780525528784
    Unavailable
    American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment
    Author

    Shane Bauer

    SHANE BAUER is an investigative journalist and photographer. He has reported from locations such as Iraq, Sudan, Chad, Syria, Yemen, Israel/Palestine, and California’s Pelican Bay supermax prison. He has written for Mother Jones, The Nation, Salon, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and others. He has received the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism, the John Jay/ H.F. Guggenheim Award for Criminal Justice Reporting, and many other national awards. He was also a finalist in the Livingston Award for journalists under 35.

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    Reviews for American Prison

    4.5/5

    128 ratings14 reviews

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    • 5/5
      In a timely and insightful view of life in a private prison in the United States, investigative reporter Shane Bauer goes undercover as a corrections officer to report on life inside this institution. It is a frightening tale of corporate greed, inhumane treatment that has spanned decades and an accurate look at how we view the role of these institutions in our society. Bauer weaves a historical narrative of for-profit prisons in our country with his personal observations and interactions with those involved in these institutions for an important read for anyone who cares about these issues.
    • 5/5
      Shane Bauer went undercover as a prison guard at a corporate-owned prison. His book is more than just a horrifying, eye-opening account of what he saw and experienced, it is also a horrifying, eye-opening account of the history of convict labor and how the prison system became a way of perpetuating slavery and white dominance throughout the former Confederacy. Without ever mentioning reparations, it makes a convincing case for reparations to make restitution to African-Americans. Not a pleasant book for anyone to read, but a necessary one.
    • 5/5
      Great read, albeit a against a tough backdrop, and AMAZING narration.
    • 5/5
      Wow. Just wow. You must read this book. I had no idea.
    • 5/5
      This is a shocking read, but in my opinion should be read by every American as well as those concerned about for-profit prisons in other countries. It’s a condemnation of the current prisons-for-profit scheme as well as a damning look at the history of prisons for profit in America. Author Shane Bauer’s work is incredibly well documented with more than 25% of the book listing his references and original research.Bauer began by going undercover as a prison guard at Winn Correctional Center, a for-profit prison in Winnfield, Louisiana.What he found was a dangerously understaffed, unregulated prison, with prisoners often running the show. There was little in the way of prisoner enrichment programs, medical care, and GED education – all mandated by the state and federal agencies. Records were carefully forged to show these programs existed. The truth is, however, that they were curtailed because every penny spent on these programs, as well as mandated personnel numbers (also carefully and spuriously documented), came out of the bottom line of the corporation’s profits.In alternating chapters Bauer also provides the history of for-profit prisons in America. They came of age after the civil war, when thousands of free blacks had no way to support themselves and there was a shortage of workers for dangerous tasks. Black prisoners died like flies in mines, building roads and railways and other dangerous work.““Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to take care of him: if he was sick get a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts: we don’t own ’em. One dies, get another.” P 130.“The torture and slaughter of thousands of African American men was no secret during the six-odd decades of postbellum convict leasing. From the beginning, newspapers had published exposés, legislative investigations had revealed startling numbers of deaths, and penal reformers and individual legislators had pushed for abolition. But outcry over humanitarian concerns had never been enough to end convict leasing on its own. It was only when leasing stopped bringing enormous profits to powerful businessmen and state treasuries that the system came apart.” P 168Although reparations for descendants of former slaves is a hot topic in American politics, after reading this you may become an advocate for reparations for descendants of ‘free’ blacks held in American prisons.
    • 4/5
      This is a quite beautifully written, straightforward book about the history and the current state of the American prison system; the author goes undercover in a privately owned prison and basically sees what happens. And if management would infer that the man’s work is fake, he wore a video and an audio recorder. Bingo.

      You just sell it like you were selling cars, or real estate, or hamburgers.
      Corrections Corporation of America cofounder Thomas Beasley

      Bauer’s work to begin with is highly interesting, as he has been imprisoned for two years in Iran. He doesn’t tell his coworkers that. Nor does he tell management he’s a journalist, which is something that blows minds afterwards.

      We have about eighty thousand people in solitary confinement in this country, more than anywhere in the world. In California’s Pelican Bay state prison alone, more than five hundred prisoners had spent at least a decade in the hole. Eighty-nine had been there for at least twenty years. One had been in solitary for forty-two years.

      I became interested in this book as I am severely interested in the criminal justice system. I live in Sweden, where people are quite prone to thinking that we’re not at all like people in the USA are; oh god! they have guns! they throw people into jail forever; these are actually things happening in Sweden today. However, we don’t have privately owned prisons. Yet.

      The schooling of Bauer into the prison to which he was hired is special.

      Four more students trickle in, and then the HR director. She scolds Reynolds for napping, and he perks up when she tells us that if we recruit a friend to work here, we’ll get five hundred bucks. She gives us a random assortment of other tips: Don’t eat the food given to inmates; don’t have sex with the inmates or you could be fined $10,000 or get sentenced to “ten years at hard labor”; try not to get sick, because we don’t get paid sick time. If we have friends or relatives incarcerated here, we need to report it. She hands out magnets to put on our fridges with a hotline to call in case we become suicidal or begin fighting with our families. We get three counseling sessions for free.

      I studiously jot down notes as the HR director fires up a video of the company’s CEO, who tells us in a corporate-promotional tone what a great opportunity it is to be a corrections officer at CCA. He is our shining light, an example of a man who climbed all the way up the ladder. (In 2018 he makes $4 million a year, twenty times the salary of the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.)

      Money has poured into the privately owned prisons for ages, and I was about to write since slavery, but technically—it is slavery.

      Forced labor was undeniably productive. An enslaved person in an antebellum cotton field picked around 75 percent more cotton per hour than a free farmer. Similarly, Texas prison farms into the 1960s produced a higher yield than farms worked by free laborers in the surrounding area. The reason is simple: People work harder when driven by torture. Texas allowed whipping in its prisons until 1941. Other states banned it much later. Arkansas prisons used the lash until 1967. But even after the whip, prisons found other ways to make inmates work harder. The morning after Sample’s first day of picking in 1956, the guards sent him, along with eight other men, to a four-by-eight-foot concrete and steel chamber to punish them for not making quota. The room was called “the pisser” and there was no light or water inside. A hole the size of a fifty-cent piece in the center of the floor served as the lavatory. The men’s panting breaths depleted the oxygen in the rancid air. “The nine of us writhed and twisted for space like maggots in a cesspool,” Sample recalled in his memoir. If someone took up too much space, a fight could break out. They stayed in the pisser all night, each taking turns lying down as the rest stood or squatted. In the morning they were brought straight out to the cotton fields.

      Yes, with slavery comes punishment.

      Back to the schooling:

      He cups his hands around his mouth. “Stop fighting,” he says to some invisible prisoners. “I said stop fighting.” His voice is nonchalant. “Y’all ain’t go’ stop, huh?” He makes like he’s backing out of a door and slams it shut. “Leave your ass in there!” He turns to face us. “Somebody’s go’ win. Somebody’s go’ lose. Hell, they both might lose, but hey, did you do your job? Hell yeah!” The classroom erupts in laughter.

      Approximately one-quarter of all British immigrants to America in the eighteenth century were convicts.

      Well, the book is very well written, and the best parts are a) the history of the prison system, b) the interaction between Bauer and the inmates, and c) how Bauer feels and mentally changes when he’s doing his work, and in his private life.

      To say this book has changed things in the USA is an understatement, but also, it was underway; then, the Trump administration turned up. Still, the people in power want to continue to make the money, and that they do.

      This book points out the issues with the prison system in America in a big way, by pointing out the little bits. It’s a massive achievement. The book breathes; this massive an achievement could easily have drowned books with the best of intentions.

      I can strongly recommend this, perhaps paired with the seminal “Ghettocide: A Story Of Murder In America“ by Jill Leovy.
    • 5/5
      Bauer previously spent two years in prison in Iran, having inadvertently crossed the border, and then came back to the US and went undercover in a Louisiana private prison. Even with that background, he can’t help being changed into a prison guard—although the Stanford Prison Experiment has been justly criticized for a lot, it’s important to acknowledge that our actual prisons are set up to encourage indifference, at best, to prisoners’ welfare, and guards respond to those conditions. It’s an incredibly compelling and horrific story of how ill-paid guards subject to corporate profit-oriented rules must and do cut corners, which he integrates with a larger history of for-profit prisons and their intimate connection to chattel slavery in the US. Highly recommended but very hard to read.
    • 4/5
      An eye prefer to a world I knew nothing about
    • 5/5
      I read the Mother Jones article but this was perfect. thanks for your hard work, Mr. Bauer
    • 5/5
      “The United States imprisons a higher portion of its population than any country in the world. In 2017 we had 2.2 million people in prisons and jails, a 500 percent increase over the last forty years. We now have almost 5 percent of the world’s population and nearly a quarter of its prisoners.”  “We have about eighty thousand people in solitary confinement in this country, more than anywhere in the world.”The author, a journalist, worked as a prison guard for four months, at a private prison, in Louisana. His horrifying discoveries, are the basis of this hard-hitting expose. He weaves his experiences, in with the history of the American prison system and both are equally disturbing. I think this a must read. No matter what administration or party is in power, this American tragedy is always over-looked and under-reported. This needs to be reformed, immediately.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Oh this one was eye-opening - and so very, very disturbing. Bauer used his own name when applying. If the references were checked they would have realized he was a senior reporter at Mother Jones. Bauer lasted four months, recording conversations and taking photos surreptitiously. What goes on inside the walls of this for profit prison is simply outrageous and egregious. Rehabilitation? That's a joke. People die in these places. The treatment of ill inmates was sickening. Bauer weaves the history of prisons in the south in his narrative. And that explained a lot. Using prisoners for profit is not a new idea. Hard to read, but this needs to be known by the public. An excellent exposé

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Can You Abide This?

      Here’s a fact that most Americans probably are not aware of. According to World Prison Brief (a public, searchable database of prison populations worldwide), the United States is the world leader in imprisonment of its own citizens. Currently, the USA has a total incarcerated population of just over 2.1 million people. How does that compare with other countries? China, with more than four times the U.S. population, incarcerates 1.6 million. Russia has around 700 thousand behind bars. And these are repressive countries. Clearly, there’s something very wrong here.

      To make matters even worst, and the subject of Bauer’s book, the U.S. has turned over a portion of imprisonment to private, moneymaking companies, such as Corrections Corporation of America (recently rebranded as CoreCivic). Privatizing American prison populations in the U.S. is nothing new, as Bauer illustrates in illuminating chapters alternating with his own experience as a prison guard at CoreCivic’s Winn Correctional Center north of Baton Rouge, LA (now run under contract by LaSalle Corrections). In the past, post Civil War, this proved an efficient way essentially to extend slavery and provide farmers and manufacturers with cheap labor, fodder for medical experiments, and other practices detrimental to those imprisoned, even on the most minor of offenses.

      So, how well has privatizing prisons worked out? If you are prisoner warehoused, for this is precisely the state of incarceration in a CoreCivic facility, not very well. And with CoreCivic growing with immigration imprisonment under the Trump administration, more people will experience what Bauer and others have chronicled: low-paid staff, nearly nonexistent hiring standard, inadequate training, lack of supplies, shortage of personnel, overcrowding, absence of even basic medical attention and mental health services, and other abuses of prisoners.

      But not everybody suffers at the hands of CoreCivic and its ilk. Some profit quite handsomely, in fact. CoreCivic, for example, has proven a profitable investment for those invested in it. While publicly traded, this is not a company widely held by the public. Its investors include CoreCivic management and investment firms. And it appears, from a financial standpoint, quite a good use of capital. As of this writing, its market cap is $2.4 billion with a dividend yield of 8.8%. All this earned in the name of justice gone horribly awry.

      Hopefully, Bauer’s book will be a wake up call to many Americans. Then again, we are a country that can’t face up to our terrible record on incarceration, a country that really has no idea how bad our prison situation is, and, worse, a country that doesn’t seem to care much. If Bauer’s book just nudged the awareness needle, well, that would be an accomplishment.
    • 4/5
      In 2014 Shane Bauer went to work undercover as a CO in a CCA prison in Louisiana for only $9/hr, and turned the piece into a lengthy exposé in Mother Jones. This book is an expansion and elaboration of that work--much of the direct experience was already published in MJ.

      Here he expands it into a history of prisons and profit, and how the South in particular used convict labor as a new slavery, profiting off the labor of prisoners--increasingly black men. CCA was born from that legacy, and as its predecessors did, makes its profit at the expense of inmates. Public prisons are bad enough; CCAs are worse. Winn is understaffed, out of control, falsifies data to the state, provides inadequate medical care, and stopped providing recreational and work opportunities for inmates to save money.

      It's not a pretty picture of the prison system.
    • 5/5
      Un-put-downable - I read it in a day.

      Shane Bauer goes undercover for four months as a guard in a for-profit prison in Louisiana, run by Correction Corporation of America (CCA), as it then was, now "rebranded" as Core Civic. Bauer, as it happens, was one of the three American journalists consigned to Tehran's notorious Evin prison for two years for accidentally wandering too close to the Iranian border, so he knows a little bit about the other side of the bars. Carrying an audio-recording pen, a notebook, and a coffee thermos with a camera built into the cap, he records and chronicles the daily nightmare that is the Winn prison. Pay starts (and remains, regardless of length of tenure) at $9/hour - well, eventually they raise it to $10 to remain at parity with the local WalMart pay scale. Dangerously understaffed (the bare minimum staff levels required by the state contract under which they operate are frequently not met), lunch in the chow hall for over 300 inmates is supervised by two guards. Two. Cost cutting means there is no one in the watch towers - an escaped inmate isn't missed for hours. There is no full time psychiatrist, there is one full time social worker. There are no classes, no education, no organized recreation, medical care is marginal at best - an inmate doubled up with chest pain is given Motrin until he collapses and dies days later. Inmates stew, complain, shriek abuse and threats, and try to kill themselves. Who can blame them? Bauer watches, engages, observes and is appalled. He struggles with his own fears and confusion: how tough should he be? how kind dare he be? who's trying to manipulate him? It's every man and woman for him or herself, and the price exacted in basic humanity is beyond payment.

      As if this front-line coverage isn't enough, Bauer alternates his own experience with powerfully in-depth research of the history of the American for-profit prison system. If you thought it was a recent invention, you are very much mistaken. Once the slaves were freed, the South had lost its labor force - and slaves at least were considered rather valuable property. But prisoners? Who cared? They were free for the taking. Lose one? There were plenty more where he came from. Plantation and manufacturing barons quickly shifted to leasing prisoners for the worst physical labor and drove many to their deaths, chained, whipped, tortured, and starved. Any child born to a woman convict (who were routinely sexually abused and raped by foremen and bosses) was legally the property of the state and taken away when the child was 10, and sent to the fields to work. State governments hired out their prisoners to private industrialists and farmers and made money that way, and the owners made even more on the backs of this cheap, limitless "human resource." The type of labor shifted from agricultural to mining and railroad works... the death rates were routinely higher than those in the worst years of the Soviet gulags.

      Yes, there was some pushback, there were some reformers. But when the revenue started dropping, the reformers were dismissed. And now we have CoreCivic and LaSalle, continuing in a handsome sanitized form, promising to house prisoners for $24 a day. You can do that if, for example, you only feed them a few hundred calories a day, as prisoners in the high-security suicide-watch ward are at Winn, under the contemptuous gaze of men dressed like black Ninjas who particularly enjoy using pepper spray and who know exactly what corners the security cameras (many of which don't work) don't cover. Bauer relates incident after incident, both observed firsthand and reported by immates or fellow staff members, and when CCA responds, the response is either they didn't know, they have no record, it was "contrary to policy," or they settled out of court. They like to say they are "committed to..." a lot of things, but don't actually DO any of them.

      Bauer finally quits. He finds himself poisoned by the experience, his innate humanity clogged with the sewage of the prison chaos. But he has written a fine and important book - his reporting as well as other audits showing higher levels of violence, waste, and unacceptable performance in for-profit prisons than in state-run facilities influenced the Obama administration to refuse to contract with for-profit entities for federal prison services. You know how that ended, right? The federal contracting was immediately reinstated by Jeff Sessions.

      Depressing, appalling, enlightening, gruesome (more than enough graphic sexual abuse and acting out is described), humane. This book should not be ignored.