American Prison by Shane Bauer

American Prison by Shane Bauer

The PBS NewsHour/New York Times Book Club February 2020 selection

New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018
One of President Barack Obama's favorite books of 2018
Winner of the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
Winner of the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism
Winner of the 2019 RFK Book and Journalism Award
A New York Times Notable 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 expos 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.

Shane Bauer is a Mother Jones senior reporter. He has won the National Magazine Award for Outstanding Reporting, the Harvard Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, the Michael Kelly Award from Atlantic Media, the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism, and at least 20 more awards. Bauer is the co-author of A Sliver of Light, a memoir about his experience as an Iranian prisoner, alongside Sarah Shourd and Joshua Fattal.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781432860004
ISBN 10	1432860003
Title	American Prison
Author	Shane Bauer
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Thorndike Press Large Print
Year published	2019-03-13
Number of pages	549
Prizes	Commended for Kirkus Prize (Nonfiction) 2018
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.