New York Times Publication Review 10 Ideal Books of 2018

One of President Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2018

Winner of the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Reserve Prize

Winner from the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Brilliance in Journalism

Winner of the 2019 RFK Reserve and Journalism Honor

A New York Times Well known Book

A ground-breaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in the us: in a single Louisiana prison and over the course of our country’s history.

In 201 about American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Trip into the Business of Abuse 4, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 one hour to work as an entry-level prison safeguard at an exclusive prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he utilized his actual name; there is no meaningful history check. Four a few months later, his employment found an abrupt end. But he previously seen more than enough, and in short order he composed an exposé about his encounters that earned a National Publication Prize and became the most-read feature in the history of the journal Mother Jones. Still, there is much more that he needed to state. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly investigated history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the years prior to the Civil Battle. For, as he shortly realized, we can’t understand the cruelty of our current system and its put in place the larger tale of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Personal prisons became entrenched in the South within a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force set up in the aftermath of slavery, as well as the echoes of the shameful roots are with us still.

The private prison system is deliberately unaccountable to public scrutiny. Private prisons aren’t incentivized to have a tendency to the health of their inmates, or to give food to them well, or even to draw in and retain a highly-trained prison personnel. Though Bauer befriends a few of his colleagues and sympathizes with their plight, the chronic dysfunction of their lives only adds to the prison’s feeling of chaos. To his horror, Bauer finds himself becoming crueler and more aggressive the longer he works in the prison, and he’s far from only.

A blistering indictment of the personal prison system, and the powerful forces that travel it, American Prison is a necessary human record about the true face of justice in the us.