American Prison : a Reporter's Undercover Journey Into the Business of Punishment

Locations
Call Number: BOCD 365.973 Ba, Adult BOCD / Nonfiction / Law / Bauer, Shane
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	BOCD 365.973 Ba	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Adult A/V 4-week checkout	Adult BOCD / Nonfiction / Law / Bauer, Shane	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Compact discs.
Read by James Fouhey, with an introduction read by the author.
"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 expose 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"-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Disturbing submitted by sushai on July 3, 2020, 9:59pm This is a very difficult book to read (or listen to, in my case) because of what it reveals about the private/for-profit prison system in the U.S. I would actually put it up there with The New Jim Crow as far as the impact it had on me. Greed is an amazing motivator for some people. Not sure what motivates people to become guards, though, in a situation like this, making $9 an hour.

The narrator did a great job of giving a voice to those involved, in the literal and figurative senses. It felt very much like watching a documentary in my head.