Sixty Days In is a popular TV show where people go undercover as inmates in jail for two months — if they even last that long. In 2014, journalist Shane Bauer flipped that script and went undercover as a guard at a private prison in Louisiana. He lasted four months.
The result was his award-winning book American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment.
He documented the abuses and problems of the prison and his corporate employer, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), now known as CoreCivic.
Bauer observes the prisoners suffering from a lack of programs, negligent health care, abuse from staff, and extremely high rates of violence, rape, and suicide. Frequent lockdowns ground the minimal programming to a halt.
Bauer recalled an inmate shouting at him, “CCA is not qualified to run this place. You always got to shut the place down. You can’t function. You can’t run school or nothing because you got everyone on lockdown.”
The guards and staff at Winn suffered, too, struggling under low pay (starting at $9 an hour), long shifts, chronic understaffing, addictions, abuse from inmates, and sexual harassment.
Turnover was so high one CCA instructor told recruits, “…if you come here and you breathing and you got a valid driver’s license and you willing to work, then we’re willing to hire you.”
In contrast to all the money going to corporations like CCA, Bauer points out the primary argument for private prisons — saving taxpayers’ money — is generally not supported by the evidence.
Due to the problems, Bauer and his fellow guards were under pressure to crack down. Bauer recalled, “I don’t care about rules per se; many of them seem arbitrary. But I become obsessed with the notion that people are breaking them in front of me to whittle away at my will.”
Importantly, Bauer himself was formerly incarcerated, locked up as an accidental political prisoner in Iran for two years, much of it in solitary confinement. He told SQ News, “I needed human contact so badly that I woke up every morning hoping to be interrogated… just so I could talk to someone.”
One of the strengths of American Prison is how the reader comes away with a deeper understanding of the historical roots of our nation’s dysfunctional and discriminatory incarceration system, as well as its evolving exploitation of incarcerated people.
The first penitentiaries — established in New England in the 1800s — relied on convict labor. Even then, critics warned this would create an incentive to incarcerate people and exploit crime for profit.
This new model blossomed into plantation prisons in the South, thanks to the loophole left in the 13th Amendment after the Civil War, which allows legal slavery in prisons to this day.
Bauer writes, “Like prison systems throughout the South, Texas’s prison system grew directly out of slavery.”
Bauer details how administrators of Texas’s Ramsey prison plantation empowered favored prisoners — so called “‘inmate trustees’” — to manage and punish the other prisoners. Whippings, starvation, torture were common, and prisoners frequently died in the cotton fields.
In 1967, a man named T. Don Hutto became the warden of Ramsey and quickly turned record profits. Yet the era of Hutto’s rise marked the end of profitable prison plantations as courts cracked down on abuses.
Unfortunately, it was also the beginning of the warehousing model of mass incarceration, fueled by the so-called “war on drugs” and “tough on crime” politicians.
This new model created a different kind of profit. Instead of agricultural profits to the state from inmate slave labor, it became profits from the state to the prison industrial complex.
Predictably, this gave rise to private prison corporations. In 1983, two West Point graduates conceived CCA, but they needed to recruit someone who had actually run a prison at a profit. The man they found: Ramsey’s Hutto.
Fast forward to today and the mood has changed. Warehousing human beings, it turns out, does not do much to improve their mental health, their outlook on life, or recidivism rates. It also costs a lot of money.
The publication of American Prison in 2018 fed a growing backlash against the profitable private prison industry.
Ironically, some inmates who transferred from out-of-state CoreCivic facilities to San Quentin preferred the private prisons because of the more comfortable living conditions.
“Those facilities weren’t overcrowded like the ones in the state. The cells were so big there. They were actually comfortable for two men to live in,” Michael Kofy Taylor told SQ News.
This contradiction reveals an important truth: Both public and private prisons can be functional or dysfunctional, can promote continued trauma or start the healing — depending on how they are managed and the culture cultivated behind their walls.
This brings to mind a quote Bauer highlights by Philip Zimbardo: “We all want to believe in our inner power, our sense of personal agency to resist external situational forces of the kinds operating in this Stanford Prison Experiment. … For many, that belief in personal power to resist powerful situational forces is little more than a reassuring illusion of invulnerability.”
I believe this is a key point to understand — whether for people in blue or people in green — in order to successfully reform prisons and rehabilitate the imprisoned. The situations and environments we create matter — in our prisons, our communities, and in our homes.
Bauer’s sense of identity steadily eroded: Was he an investigative journalist on an undercover assignment? Or a prison guard doing whatever it took to get through each day?
“It is getting in my blood,” Bauer writes. “The boundary between pleasure and anger is blurring. To shout makes me feels 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. All that matters any more is action.”
The stress of his job bleeds over into his marriage.
“It’s become routine,” Bauer recalls. “I call, we talk, we fight, we hang up… She feels like I am angry all the time, and that I don’t see what I am becoming.”
Realizing his peril, Bauer decides to quit but hangs on when offered a chance at a promotion until a dramatic turn of events abruptly ends his undercover assignment.
After his time at Winn, Bauer was granted an interview by the elderly Hutto, but it was suddenly cancelled.
“Maybe he had an inkling that I wanted to know how, in a single mind, the thinking had evolved from running an operation in Texas that so blatantly resembled slavery to a slick corporation that would make billions by warehousing people,” Bauer writes.
After reading American Prison, I could not help but wonder who would be the next Hutto.
I could not help but wonder how the next round of “tough on crime” politicians would spin the narrative to justify continued exploitation of the incarcerated to protect the profits of the prison industrial complex.
I could not help but wonder what, 20 years from now, an undercover journalist — whether disguised in green or in blue — would discover in America’s prisons.
