They convince themselves, with remarkable ease, that they are in the business of punishment, because it makes the world better, not because it makes them rich.”
In 2014, Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer went undercover as a guard at Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana. Winn Correctional was a for-profit prison run by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), later renamed to the deceptively publicly responsible CoreCivic. American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment delves into the history of prisons-for-profit and Bauer’s experience as a correctional guard for four months, where he found himself torn between his own past as a prisoner in Iran for a border violation and the echoes of the Stanford Prison Experiment, where the “guards” soon exercised their power in punitive ways.
The book alternates between chapters about the past, where convict leasing–the farming out of prisoners to do free, hard labor–rose in the 1800s, little better than slavery in which the prisoners were tortured, beaten, and worked to death. These prisons sent their prisoners to private plantations and businesses for a lucrative fee. Eventually the state got involved and leased the prisoners to perform work at a fraction of the cost of free labor. Big businesses and farms eagerly paid the state for these workers, and those businesses sometimes subleased the convicts to others. The majority of prisoners were Black, sent to the penitentiary for mostly minor crimes in the post-Civil War era. Convict leasing only ended when a white prisoner was murdered and the fall out shut down the practice. But other systems took its place, like chain gangs and eventually for-profit prisons in modern times.
Bauer’s time as a guard exposes him to the bad conditions at the CCA-run prison and the cruelty of its practices. Any rehabilitative programs are shut down, the facilities are grossly run down, there is a severe shortage of staff, sick prisoners–some of them gravely ill–are rarely sent to the hospital and receive inadequate and neglectful treatment at the prison infirmary. Guards are trained to look the other way when peers beat the prisoners. There are indiginities down to the smallest detail, where prisoners’ beds are a thin strip of foam and their belongings regularly tossed and taken.
Over time, Bauer finds himself being ground down in ways that make him ashamed. Towards the end of his tenure, he finds himself thrilling to denying prisoners things they ask for, giving harsh treatment to the inmates, writing them up for everything, barking at even the prisoners he had previously made uneasy but friendly connections with. As he sees his own inhumanity rising against everything he believes in–in spite of his own imprisonment in the past–he finally quits the job after four months. The CCA lashes back when they discover he’s a reporter and threatens to sue him and Mother Jones when the initial article is published. In the end, nothing happens, and Bauer goes on to expand his article into this book. It’s a fascinating, sobering book, that continues my exposure to mass incarceration, which started with The New Jim Crow.
