American Prison is both the remarkable story of a journalist who spent four months working as a corrections officer, and a horrifying exposé of how prisoners were treated by a corporation that profited from them ... Bauer's insights into what some call the 'prison-industrial complex' are fascinating, and the history he provides offers crucial context into his time working at a CCA facility. It's Bauer's investigative chops, though, that make American Prison so essential ... The stories he tells are deeply sad and consistently infuriating ... American Prison is an enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.
American Prison reprises [Baurer's] page-turning narrative [from Mother Jones], and adds not only the fascinating back story of CCA, the nation’s first private prison company, but also an eye-opening examination of the history of corrections as a profit-making enterprise, of which the advent of the private prisons that now house 8 percent of American inmates is only the latest chapter ... Bauer is a generous narrator with a nice ear for detail, and his colleagues come across as sympathetic characters, with a few notable exceptions. In a wonderful twist, he interviews a number of them after his deception is eventually exposed. How much loyalty does $9 per hour buy? About as much as you’d imagine; most are all too happy to help pull the curtain back on CCA.
An undercover reporter, he meticulously and evocatively described the conditions of the prison ... Bauer intersperses...searing first-person accounts with a history of the private-prison system ... American Prison paints a damning portrait of T. Don Hutto, co-founder and former CEO of the [prison's] corporation ... Bauer holds out little hope of any legitimate reform: 'If CCA raised guards’ wages, hired enough staff, and provided adequate staff, it would lose its profit margins ... If, on the other hand, states raised their rates to cover the costs of reforms, they would no longer be saving money, which means there would be no reason for them to rely on private companies to run their prisons.' As American Prison tragically makes clear, the weight of this paradox lands on the shoulders of the people in the prison system.
Bauer’s amazing book examines one of slavery’s toxic legacies, using convicted people to make profit, through a dual approach ... 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.
Bauer vividly depicts Winn’s poisonous culture as he finds himself succumbing to its mind-set of paranoid authoritarianism. 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.
Bauer’s prose isn’t the sort that calls intention to itself, which is only to the good. The facts he reports, the prisoners he interviews, and the corrections officers he quotes are more telling about conditions at Winn than the finest nonfiction prose could ever be ... American Prison is a disturbing, moving, and important book.
...[a] celebrated book ... Bauer’s investigation had some effect: CCA lost its contract to operate Winn Correctional Facility, where Bauer worked ... The rural people who resort to working with him in corrections at Winn sound universally unfortunate ... These are sad portraits, but sometimes they are sympathetic. The inmates, on the other hand, are not so sympathetic ... I wondered whether a conscious editorial decision had been made to ignore any brightness there might have been in that prison, or if Bauer’s uniformly bad news was an unconscious consequence of assuming the guard role, putting the inmates somewhere beyond the reach of fellow feeling ... Bauer’s book reminds us that the real criminals in the story are in corporate.
Nearly every page of this tale contains examples of shocking inhumanity ... A potent, necessary broadside against incarceration in the U.S., which 'imprisons a higher portion of its population than any country in the world.' ”