Overview

A harrowing and groundbreaking account of going undercover as a guard in a private prison in Louisiana, springing from the extraordinary National Magazine Award-winning Mother Jones cover story that shocked a nation

In 2015, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winn, Louisiana. He used his real name, and although it was apparent to all who could use Google that he was an award-winning investigative journalist with a history of immersive inside stories, no meaningful background check was done on him. 120 days later, after the prison cottoned to what he was up to, he was summarily fired. His Mother Jones cover story exploded in summer 2016; it became that magazine's most read story in history. In response, the Obama administration announced that federal prisoners would no longer be housed in private prisons. Hillary Clinton announced her full support. One of the first moves President Trump made was to reverse that order; no industry's stock price has been more positively affected by Trump's victory than the private prison sector.

In American Prison, Shane Bauer tells the full, horrific story of his own experiences, and those of the prisoners and other guards around him, in the private prison system, a sector that has been 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. The rampant dysfunction of the prison guards is at times a close second to the dysfunction of the prisons. To his shame, Bauer finds himself becoming crueler and more aggressive the longer he works in the prison, and he is far from alone. Prison is a brutalizing experience for all involved.

Woven into the narrative is a ground-breaking history of the private prison system in America, from its origins in the aftermath of the Civil War. Private prisons sprang up in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery. The echoes of these shameful origins are still with us in the management of today's largest companies.

A powerful indictment of the private prison system, and of the phenomenon of mass incarceration that drives it, American Prison is a powerful human document about the true face of justice in America.