num_pages: 351
description: 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; 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.
language: English
title: American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment
publisher: Penguin Press