American Prison
So many now free blacks were thrown into prisons and made to work. Private companies, such as U.S. Steel, received prisoners to work in their mines, where they died like flies. The chain gang, an iconic symbol of prison, was used to have prisoners work on roads. This lasted until the 1930s. Despite the stoppage of the licensing of convicts, there is now a new form of legal slavery--the private prison.
Shane Bauer, a reporter for Mother Jones, went undercover, working for four months as a guard at a prison in rural Louisiana. At the time it was owned by the Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison corporation. The state would pay the prison so much for each inmate. There was also a guarantee that the state would keep 'em coming:
"Roughly two-thirds of private prison contracts include “occupancy guarantees” that require states to pay a fee if they cannot provide a certain number of inmates. Under CCA’s contract with Louisiana’s Department of Corrections, Winn was guaranteed to be 96 percent full." Needless to say, Louisiana could find convicts--mostly black. Bauer's resulting book is American Prison, a combination of a memoir and a damning attack on the private prison industry.
The United States has the highest prison population in the world. The nation has five percent of the world's population but 25 percent of its prisoners. There have been many tries at reform, but nothing seems to work, and the thinking that making prisons run at a profit might help. From Bauer's account, that's not true.
Bauer, who was a prisoner in Iraq for over a year, got the job easily--they took almost anyone, perhaps because they only paid $9.00 an hour. He describes his training, where he hears several times that it was better when they could beat inmates (Bauer and his colleagues were not armed, not even with batons). It's a bit of a psychological experiment for him--he cites the Stanford Experiment, in which college students were assigned roles as guards or prisoners and the guards turned into monsters. Bauer writes: "Are the soldiers of Abu Ghraib, or even Auschwitz guards and ISIS hostage-takers, inherently different from you and me? We take comfort in the notion of an unbridgeable gulf between good and evil, but maybe we should understand, as Zimbardo’s work suggested, that evil is incremental—something we are all capable of given the right circumstances."
Bauer alternates his experiences with chapters on the history of the prison system in America, which is not rosy. He throws out astonishingly horrifying facts, such as: "In the deadliest year of Louisiana’s lease, nearly 20 percent of convicts perished. Between 1870 and 1901, some three thousand Louisiana convicts, most of whom were black, died under James’s regime."
Bauer is torn between wanting to do his best, but also not to be an ogre. He struggles after finding a contraband phone, and ends up turning it in. He tries to be reasonable with prisoners, but sometimes erupts if they call him names like "faggot." He is empathetic with some prisoners. During his turns on the suicide watch detail he meets Damien Coestly, who will die weighing 71 pounds. Prisoners are routinely ignored when they mention health concerns. Any kind of formal complaint is basically just laughed at, and the can't afford attorneys.
Bauer starts to crack a little bit, and quits just at the right time, when a photographer from Mother Jones is arrested with photos of Bauer. He beats a hasty retreat, shipping all his notes and recordings (he used a pen tape recorder) out of state. "It is getting in my blood. The boundary between pleasure and anger is blurring. To shout makes me feel alive. I take pleasure in saying no to prisoners. I like to hear them complain about my write-ups. I like to ignore them when they ask me to cut them a break. When they hang their clothes to dry in the TV room, an unauthorized area, I confiscate the laundry and feel a thrill when they shout from down the tier as I take it away."
If the book has a drawback it's that it's a bit repetitive--how many times can we read about the horrible treatment of prisoners? I found the history of prisons interesting, but the stuff inside the prison probably worked better as a magazine article. I will admit that I could see, hear, and smell what Bauer was writing about (the sanitary conditions were not up to par).
Prisoners are on the lowest level in our society, so it takes a special type of person to care about them. Bauer does not sentimentalize them--he describes one man as being the kind of person who belongs in prison. But they are human beings, and should be treated as such. We hear congressmen mentioning that giving female prisoners tampons would make a penitentiary like a country club. With that kind of thinking, it seems like reform will never happen.
One good thing did come out of Bauer's article--the Federal government has done away with private prisons. Bauer's statistics show that they do not work--they have more violence that public prisons (a violent spree in Winn included a confiscation of 51 shanks--one for every seven men) and only succeed in making people rich.
Prison reform is not a campaign winner. Can anything be done/
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