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.