American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

Author：Shane Bauer（謝恩·鮑爾）

Publisher: Penguin Press (2018/9/18)

精裝: 368 pages

Language: 英語

ISBN-13：9780735223585

Product Dimensions: 16.1 x 3.1 x 24.2 cm 

書籍簡介

謝恩·鮑爾是一名美國記者，曾獲戈德史密斯調查報告獎和邁克爾·凱利獎。《美國監獄》是基於鮑爾於 2014 年搬到路易斯安那州後在一傢俬人監獄做卧底獄警的經歷寫成。《紐約時報》介紹，《美國監獄》是一本細緻的恐怖目錄，作者披露了囚犯被租借給公司作為勞動力的暴行，這種現象就這樣存在於美國，並發展成了一個價值百萬美元的產業。

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.

作者簡介

Shane Bauer is a senior reporter for Mother Jones. He is the recipient of the National Magazine Award for Best Reporting, Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, Atlantic Media's Michael Kelly Award, the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism, and at least 20 others. Bauer is the co-author, along with Sarah Shourd and Fattal, of a memoir, A Sliver of Light, which details his time spent as a prisoner in Iran.