Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Readalikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Sep 2018, 368 pages
Paperback:
Jun 2019, 368 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Rose Rankin
Buy This 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.
You can read an extensive excerpt of American Prison at Mother Jones
Shane Bauer chose to go undercover as a corrections officer at a for-profit prison in Louisiana, and the result is a damning portrait of the business of incarcerating Americans, and the legacy of racism in the criminal justice system. The juxtaposition of Bauer's experience with the historical chapters provides a rich context, helping the reader to understand how the present system came to be...continued
Full Review
(751 words).
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Rose Rankin).
With a Trump-appointed Justice Department pushing for harsher sentences after a brief period of relative leniency during the Obama Administration, the explosion of the prison population has become an increasingly relevant social and political issue. America has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world (with 2.3 million people currently living in its prisons, jails, and other detention centers), and one in five criminal offenses is related to drugs. It is common to see this as a recent phenomenon—a change due to "tough on crime" policies such as three strikes and mandatory minimum sentences. These laws undoubtedly contributed to the recent increase in rates of incarceration, but they are also part of a long-running ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked American Prison, try these:
by Winfred Rembert
Published 2023
Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager. He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent seven years on chain gangs.
by Christine Montross
Published 2021
Galvanized by her work in our nation's jails, psychiatrist Christine Montross illuminates the human cost of mass incarceration and mental illness
"Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time."
—Sappho, fragment ...
This Other Eden
by Paul Harding
A novel inspired by the true story of Malaga Island from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Tinkers.
Margot
by Wendell Steavenson
A young woman struggles to break free of her upper-class upbringing amid the whirlwind years of the sexual revolution.
Moonrise Over New Jessup
by Jamila Minnicks
"Jamila Minnicks pulled me into pages of history I'd never turned before."—Barbara Kingsolver
Life is the garment we continually alter, but which never seems to fit.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.