American Prison

A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

By: Shane Bauer

Narrated by: James Fouhey, Shane Bauer

An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” —NPR.org

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 exposé 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.

Dark, entertaining, and informative.

Quite possibly one of the most entertaining non-fiction books I’ve ever read. A glimpse into the twisted world of the American prison system that will throw you into an emotional whirlwind of anger, sadness, and hopelessness.

An important read if we are ever going to fix this deeply broken piece of our society. We have 4% of the world’s population yet 1/4 of its prisoners. The goal seems to be to make prison profitable, not to rehabilitate criminals. If you are a true patriot and care about the USA, you’ll read this book!

The narration is very well done also.

Intense

Enjoyable, interesting, intense. Once I started listening on Audible, I couldn’t stop until I was completely finished. A bit too much detail on the history of U.S. prisons, but all in all satisfying. Great work by the author on exposing the truth about private prisons in America.

A history of slavery and an explanation of how it continues.

This is an insiders account of how corrupted and despicable the American prison system is.

Everything is a commodity. Everything is a for-profit venture in a system as parasitic as ours.

Other countries such as Norway genuinely try to rehabilitate their criminals. America only seems them as yet another source of profit.

Don’t turn away. Read. We must understand how the system works if we are to fight it.

It's a scary book.

Shane Bauer was brutally honest - that's why I recommend the book. He describes prison conditions and how it shaped his character in 4 short months. Prison immersion changes people, believe it.

Government allows private prisons because they're cheaper, plain and simple. By the end of the book, one understands this forward and backward.

The book gives a window into how things actually work in private prisons, the cold logic that prevails while most of the rest falls off. It's difficult for the mind to reconcile such differences, but one learns to accept them.

The scary thing is how the historical sections of the book don't support any reason to hope things are going to get better.

Wow!

This is an amazing investigative journey. The way the author gives historical lesson while he works as an undercover guard is fantastic. He takes a gut wrenching look at the history of warehousing people for money.