American Prison

Starred review from June 18, 2018
Deprivation, abuse, and fear oppress inmates and guards alike in this hard-hitting exposé of the for-profit prison industry. Mother Jones reporter Bauer, who wrote about being imprisoned in Iran for two years in A Sliver of Light, hired on as a guard
in 2014 at Louisiana’s Winn Correctional Center, a private prison run by Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic). Equipped with a hidden camera and recorder, he found a snake pit of exploited labor and substandard correctional services. Bauer and his fellow guards were understaffed (sometimes three guards for a 352-prisoner unit), paid $9 an hour, poorly trained, and afraid of inmates; prison management veered between chaotic laxness and brutal crackdowns. With a $34-per-day-per-inmate budget, the prison axed educational and recreational programs and fatally skimped on health care (one inmate Bauer met lost both legs after officials failed to hospitalize him for an infection; another hanged himself after his suicide threats were ignored). Bauer vividly depicts Winn’s poisonous culture as he finds himself succumbing to its mind-set of paranoid authoritarianism (“Striving to treat everyone as human takes too much energy. More and more I focus on proving I won’t back down”). In addition, he sets his reportage in the context of a history of for-profit incarceration in the South that is rife with racism and torture. The result is a gripping indictment of a bad business.

June 15, 2018
A penetrating exposé on the cruelty and mind-bending corruption of privately run prisons across the United States, with a focus on the Winn facility in Louisiana.That prison was operated by the Corrections Corporation of America, but after a shorter version of this book appeared in Mother Jones, the company rebranded as CoreCivic and lost the Winn contract with the government. Bauer (co-author: A Sliver of Light: Three Americans Imprisoned in Iran, 2014), who has won the National Magazine Award in addition to many others, spent four months inside the prison as a corrections officer, carrying out an undercover journalism assignment to find the truth behind CCA's documented record of lies about its practices. At least 8 percent of inmates in state prisons must adjust to the practices of laxly regulated private companies rather than those in government-run facilities. At Winn, correctional officers (a term they prefer to "guard") risk their safety every day for $9 per hour. Bauer determined that the guards, most of them unarmed, were outnumbered by the inmates by a ratio as high as 200 to 1. The author had also viewed prison from a different perspective, having been incarcerated for two years in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison because he had unwittingly crossed a border while hiking as a tourist. Despite the awful conditions in his Iranian cell, Bauer found many of the conditions in Louisiana to be even worse. Nearly every page of this tale contains examples of shocking inhumanity. During his four months at Winn, Bauer also noticed a cruelty streak developing in his own character; even some of the inmates told Bauer that he was changing, and not for the better. Interspersed with the chapters about Winn, Bauer includes historical context--e.g., after the end of the Civil War, states continued slavery by a different name, forcing prisoners to pick cotton and perform other grueling tasks that produced income for prison administrations.A potent, necessary broadside against incarceration in the U.S., which "imprisons a higher portion of its population than any country in the world."

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October 15, 2018

With the support of his editors at Mother Jones, investigative journalist Bauer spent four months working as a corrections officer at the private, for-profit Corrections Corporation of America prison in Winnfield, LA, in order to document the daily reality of incarceration in this country. This work weaves that experience with the long history of for-profit incarceration in the United States, a history that grew alongside chattel slavery and eventually replaced it as the nation's primary source of unfree labor. In addition to documenting the abuse of inmates, widespread and encouraged by management-level employees, this book also exposes how the majority of prison staff also live on the economic margins, vulnerable to exploitation by their employer. Bauer's work is effectively informed by his own arrest and 26 months of incarceration while on assignment in Iran. VERDICT Bauer tells a powerful story at a moment when Americans are asking hard questions about the use and abuse of incarceration. This informative book will surely find many passionate readers.--Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc., Boston

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2018
Bauer's amazing book examines one of slavery's toxic legacies, using convicted people to make profit, through a dual approach. The first is historical, tracing southern states' exploitation of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and forced labor except as punishment for a crime. Convicts could be legally forced to labor, and a variety of sadistic tortures increased their productivity significantly over free labor. This loophole incentivized the incarceration of large numbers of mostly African American people. Convict labor leasing created much infrastructure in the South, popularized the chain gang, and often led to convicts' deaths. Bauer's second approach details his personal account of the four months in 2014-15 during which he worked as a correctional officer in a Louisiana prison, earning $9 per hour, for the Corrections Corporation of America. Frustrated with the lack of transparency and accountability in the for-profit prison industry, Bauer went undercover in hope of obtaining accurate information. Bauer also examines his own motivations, ethics, and behavior during this period and does not spare himself. In short, he observes an acutely dangerous and out-of-control environment created by CCA's profit-driven underpaying of staff and understaffing of prisons. Bauer's historical and journalistic work should be required reading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)