Inside The Broken California Prison System

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Inside the Broken California Prison System

Author : Boston Woodard
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780964700932
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis Inside the Broken California Prison System by : Boston Woodard

Download or read book Inside the Broken California Prison System written by Boston Woodard and published by . This book was released on 2011-10 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inside the Broken California Prison System by veteran jailhouse journalist Boston Woodard provides an insider 's view of California's dysfunctional prison industrial complex in crisis. On May 23, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that due to massive overcrowding, California is in violation of the Eighth Amendment, which constitutionally prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Because its 33 prisons are at nearly 200 percent capacity, the state has been ordered to release or find new accommodations for more than 30,000 prisoners within two years. With the harshest sentencing laws, toughest parole policy, and highest recidivism rate in the nation, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is a failure on all counts except for those who profit from the $10 billion spent annually to maintain it. Woodard describes how it came to this, as well as the day-to-day reality of the impact on prisoners in a corrupt system effectively accountable to no one.Inside the Broken California Prison System is a collection of more than 40 articles originally published over a period of six years in the Community Alliance, a small monthly newspaper in Fresno, California. They detail subjects such as restricted media access to prisoners, the brutal impact of overcrowding, medical and mental health treatment failures, rogue prison staff, religious and racial discrimination, an omnipotent prison guard union, and shipping prisoners out of state to private prisons. At the same time he offers real solutions to the overcrowding problem that would not endanger public safety.Woodard is a writer, musician, literacy tutor, event organizer, and prisoners rights advocate who has been writing about what goes on inside the California prison system for almost two decades in both free world and prison publications. His articles have embarrassed and angered prison officials used to operating without public oversight, and he 's paid a price for exercising his First Amendment right to define his surroundings. He 's been put in the Hole, had his mail tampered with, lost his typewriter, subjected to verbal threats, had his personal property stolen or destroyed, and been illegally and adversely transferred from prison to prison. Still he refuses to be intimidated. My writing is not about prison rights, he says. It 's about the public 's right to know about the good and bad within these prison walls and how their money is being spent. It 's also about the positive efforts of men and women given up for lost by society. I just want the guards and prison officials to do what is demanded of me and every other prisoner in the system, and that is to obey the law and follow the regulations.

A Germ of Goodness

Author : Shelley Bookspan
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 9780803212169
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (121 download)

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Book Synopsis A Germ of Goodness by : Shelley Bookspan

Download or read book A Germ of Goodness written by Shelley Bookspan and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most of the ninety-three years between 1851, when the California State Legislature faced the problem of what to do with criminals, until 1944, when it finally organized the state's four prisons into one adult penal system, the prisons at San Quentin and Folsom were the only places of incarceration for the state's felons. Bookspan traces the development of a system emphasizing deterrence and retribution to one receptive to reform and rehabilitation. ø "This is the story," writes Bookspan, "of the penury and personality struggle through which California developed a prison system to assess, and to address, individual needs while retaining its custodial institutions. It is a story of the West, even though eastern penology, with all of its overtones of moral duty, provided the language for prison reform. In a state where chaos preceded the assertion of normative rule, fear, not hope, formed the governing principle of penology. It is a story of America because true reform on an expanded sense of individual potential."

The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement

Author : Eric Cummins
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780804722322
Total Pages : 358 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement by : Eric Cummins

Download or read book The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement written by Eric Cummins and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a history of the California prison movement from 1950 to 1980, focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area's San Quentin State Prison and highlighting the role that prison reading and writing played in the creation of radical inmate ideology in those years. The book begins with the Caryl Chessman years (1948-60) and closes with the trial of the San Quentin Six (1975-76) and the passage of California's Determinate Sentencing Law (1977). This was an extraordinary era in the California prisons, one that saw the emergence of a highly developed radical convict resistance movement inside prison walls. This inmate groundswell was fueled at times by remarkable individual prisoners, at other times by groups like the Black Muslims or the San Quentin chapter of the Black Panther Party. But most often resistance grew from much wider sources and in quiet corners: from dozens of political study groups throughout the prison; from an underground San Quentin newspaper; and from covert attempts to organize a prisoners' union. The book traces the rise and fall of the prisoners' movement, ending with the inevitably bloody confrontation between prisoners and the state and the subsequent prison administration crackdown. The author examines the efforts of prison staff to augment other methods of inmate management by attempting to modify convict ideology by means of "bibliotherapy" and communication control, and describes convict resistance to these attempts as control. He also discusses how Bay Area political activists became intensely involved in San Quentin and how such writings as Chessman's Cell 2455, Cleaver's Soul on Ice, and Jackson's Soledad Brother reached far beyond prison walls to influence opinion, events, and policy.

Doing Time in the Depression

Author : Ethan Blue
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479821357
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis Doing Time in the Depression by : Ethan Blue

Download or read book Doing Time in the Depression written by Ethan Blue and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014-11-22 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As banks crashed, belts tightened, and cupboards emptied across the country, American prisons grew fat. Doing Time in the Depression tells the story of the 1930s as seen from the cell blocks and cotton fields of Texas and California prisons, state institutions that held growing numbers of working people from around the country and the world—overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately non-white, and displaced by economic crisis. Ethan Blue paints a vivid portrait of everyday life inside Texas and California’s penal systems. Each element of prison life—from numbing boredom to hard labor, from meager pleasure in popular culture to crushing pain from illness or violence—demonstrated a contest between keepers and the kept. From the moment they arrived to the day they would leave, inmates struggled over the meanings of race and manhood, power and poverty, and of the state itself. In this richly layered account, Blue compellingly argues that punishment in California and Texas played a critical role in producing a distinctive set of class, race, and gender identities in the 1930s, some of which reinforced the social hierarchies and ideologies of New Deal America, and others of which undercut and troubled the established social order. He reveals the underside of the modern state in two very different prison systems, and the making of grim institutions whose power would only grow across the century.

The Green Wall

Author : D. J. Vodicka
Publisher : iUniverse
ISBN 13 : 1440140596
Total Pages : 154 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (41 download)

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Book Synopsis The Green Wall by : D. J. Vodicka

Download or read book The Green Wall written by D. J. Vodicka and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2009 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The career of Donald "D.J." Vodicka encompassed the rapid expansion of the prison system. For sixteen years, he was a prison guard in California's highest security prisons, serving meals to gang leaders, serial killers in lockdown cells, and patrolling exercise yards filled with violent felons while unarmed and outnumbered 1000-2. He was a decorated veteran officer. He became the sole "whistle-blower" to uncover a group of rogue prison guards who called themselves "The Green Wall". " -- Back cover.

The Mars Room

Author : Rachel Kushner
Publisher : Scribner
ISBN 13 : 1476756589
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (767 download)

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Book Synopsis The Mars Room by : Rachel Kushner

Download or read book The Mars Room written by Rachel Kushner and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: TIME’S #1 FICTION TITLE OF THE YEAR • NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 FINALIST for the MAN BOOKER PRIZE and the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD LONGLISTED for the ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL An instant New York Times bestseller from two-time National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room earned tweets from Margaret Atwood—“gritty, empathic, finely rendered, no sugar toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled”—and from Stephen King—“The Mars Room is the real deal, jarring, horrible, compassionate, funny.” It’s 2003 and Romy Hall, named after a German actress, is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: her young son, Jackson, and the San Francisco of her youth. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, portrayed with great humor and precision. Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room is “wholly authentic…profound…luminous” (The Wall Street Journal), “one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart” (The New York Times Book Review, cover review)—a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined and “affirms Rachel Kushner as one of our best novelists” (Entertainment Weekly).

Down on the Yard

Author : Glenn Langohr
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (139 download)

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Book Synopsis Down on the Yard by : Glenn Langohr

Download or read book Down on the Yard written by Glenn Langohr and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before becoming a best selling author, Glenn Langohr was a prisoner on drug charges. To survive gang wars, guards who incite riots and racial segregation where every inch of space is fought over, he took over as a shot caller.

Violence in California Prisons

Author : James Gilligan
Publisher : DIANE Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0756706807
Total Pages : 56 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (567 download)

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Book Synopsis Violence in California Prisons by : James Gilligan

Download or read book Violence in California Prisons written by James Gilligan and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2000 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

23/7

Author : Keramet Reiter
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300224559
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis 23/7 by : Keramet Reiter

Download or read book 23/7 written by Keramet Reiter and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-31 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How America’s prisons turned a “brutal and inhumane” practice into standard procedure Originally meant to be brief and exceptional, solitary confinement in U.S. prisons has become long-term and common. Prisoners spend twenty-three hours a day in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact for years on end, and they are held entirely at administrators’ discretion. Keramet Reiter tells the history of one “supermax,” California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, whose extreme conditions recently sparked a statewide hunger strike by 30,000 prisoners. This book describes how Pelican Bay was created without legislative oversight, in fearful response to 1970s radicals; how easily prisoners slip into solitary; and the mental havoc and social costs of years and decades in isolation. The product of fifteen years of research in and about prisons, this book provides essential background to a subject now drawing national attention.

The US Prison System and Prison Life

Author : Duchess Harris
Publisher : ABDO
ISBN 13 : 1532173407
Total Pages : 115 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (321 download)

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Book Synopsis The US Prison System and Prison Life by : Duchess Harris

Download or read book The US Prison System and Prison Life written by Duchess Harris and published by ABDO. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The US Prison System and Prison Life examines all aspects of prisons in the United States. It discusses the history behind US prisons, what life is like for inmates, and how prisons affect their surrounding communities. Features include a glossary, further readings, websites, source notes, and an index. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.

Honor Comes Hard

Author : Luis J. Rodriguez
Publisher : Tia Chucha
ISBN 13 : 9781882688388
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (883 download)

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Book Synopsis Honor Comes Hard by : Luis J. Rodriguez

Download or read book Honor Comes Hard written by Luis J. Rodriguez and published by Tia Chucha. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prison writing has a long and illustrious history in the United States--home of the modern correctional system. In the first decade of the 21st century, this country also garnered the distinction of having more prisoners per capita than any other nation in the world. We need to hear from the incarcerated writings of incarcerated men and women. The largest state prison system is in California with some 175,000 people behind bars in close to 35 facilities. Yet the only approved Honor Yard in the Department of Corrections is at the California State Prison, Los Angeles County, in Lancaster, CA. These are the men that despite often-horrendous crimes--many are lifers, with a few going on three decades--have proven their capacity to dream, to create, to write, to change. From poems, to stories, to novel excerpts, to reportage, to personal essays--and a few drawings--"Honor Comes Hard" depicts what can happen to people who are given, as Clarence Darrow expressed many years ago, "a chance to live." The work is drawn from writing classes that Lucinda Thomas helped organize in the Honor Yard over several years, and from workshops conducted by Luis J. Rodriguez on most Sundays, for eight hours a day, through eight months in 2007-2008.

Strategies of Control

Author : Sheldon L. Messinger
Publisher : Quid Pro Books
ISBN 13 : 1610273583
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (12 download)

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Book Synopsis Strategies of Control by : Sheldon L. Messinger

Download or read book Strategies of Control written by Sheldon L. Messinger and published by Quid Pro Books. This book was released on 2016-05-27 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study of transitions and control in the California prison system has been extensively read, cited, and quoted in unpublished form—and is finally easily available worldwide. Already a compelling part of the canon of studies in penology, criminology, sociology, and organizational theory, this new edition of STRATEGIES OF CONTROL adds a 2016 foreword by Howard S. Becker and afterword by Jonathan Simon, both contributing substantive and meaningful views of this important work. Considered influential to two generations of scholars worldwide, Messinger's thesis examining prison systems' organization and reform—or in some ways, regression—is said to anticipate Erving Goffman's and Michel Foucault's writings on "total institutions" by many years, and raised themes that only years later would become influential in criminology and sociology. Its new digital edition features quality formatting, active Contents, linked notes and cross-references, and all of the tables and charts of the original study. Writing in the new foreword, Becker notes that this book is a "a masterful analysis of a systematically connected group of organizations, seeing them not as separate entities, but as a system whose organizational routines and peculiarities we couldn't understand if we didn't know their external connections as well as their internal workings." Its research methodology was painstaking: "The officials of the new system's components, especially the wardens of the individual prisons, had [many] questions on their minds. You couldn’t answer those questions by observing one of those prisons for a year or two." Not so in the author's decade of research leading up to this work. Indeed, Becker concludes, "Messinger's study provides the blueprint for more accurate and persuasive analyses of large organizations of every kind." Simon writes in the new afterword that this book remains "an important contribution to understanding the nature of imprisonment and more broadly to the study of punishment in modern society," providing "a crucial background for rethinking the recent history of prisons and particularly the rise of mass incarceration, which has seen the proliferation of multi-prison systems, extensions of bureaucratic management within prisons, and the abandonment of rehabilitation as a central justification for punishment." Simon adds: "Creating a sociological analysis for such a complex extended network required a break with traditional sociological thinking," and going further in "suggesting another analytic shift from studying the 'prison system' to studying the broad array of agencies and authorities that made up 'the correctional establishment.'" Policymakers, practitioners, and scholars who are interested in a better understanding of the relationship between correctional systems, their comprising organizational components, and practices will learn much from this study. It provides a truly original contribution to our sociological understanding of how formal organizations comprising a correctional system evolve and operate through a series of relationships ultimately producing control of the system itself, its prisons, and its inmates. Given the current focus on evidence-based justice, Messinger's documentation and unique interpretation of the organizational dynamics, interconnections, and dependencies within correctional systems are clearly relevant and crucial to the successful implementation of such “translational criminology” reforms. — Thomas G. Blomberg Dean and Sheldon L. Messinger Professor of Criminology College of Criminology and Criminal Justice Florida State University Author, Advancing Criminology Part of the Classics of Law & Society Series from Quid Pro Books, this foundational book is at last available to a general audience, researchers, and students in eBook form. Also available in new paperback and hardcover editions (2016).

Mass Incarceration on Trial

Author : Jonathan Simon
Publisher : New Press, The
ISBN 13 : 1595587926
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (955 download)

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Book Synopsis Mass Incarceration on Trial by : Jonathan Simon

Download or read book Mass Incarceration on Trial written by Jonathan Simon and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2014-08-05 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly forty years the United States has been gripped by policies that have placed more than 2.5 million Americans in jails and prisons designed to hold a fraction of that number of inmates. Our prisons are not only vast and overcrowded, they are degrading—relying on racist gangs, lockdowns, and Supermax-style segregation units to maintain a tenuous order. Mass Incarceration on Trial examines a series of landmark decisions about prison conditions—culminating in Brown v. Plata, decided in May 2011 by the U.S. Supreme Court—that has opened an unexpected escape route from this trap of “tough on crime” politics. This set of rulings points toward values that could restore legitimate order to American prisons and, ultimately, lead to the demise of mass incarceration. Simon argues that much like the school segregation cases of the last century, these new cases represent a major breakthrough in jurisprudence—moving us from a hollowed-out vision of civil rights to the threshold of human rights and giving court backing for the argument that, because the conditions it creates are fundamentally cruel and unusual, mass incarceration is inherently unconstitutional. Since the publication of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, states around the country have begun to question the fundamental fairness of our criminal justice system. This book offers a provocative and brilliant reading to the end of mass incarceration.

Are Prisons Obsolete?

Author : Angela Y. Davis
Publisher : Seven Stories Press
ISBN 13 : 1609801040
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (98 download)

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Book Synopsis Are Prisons Obsolete? by : Angela Y. Davis

Download or read book Are Prisons Obsolete? written by Angela Y. Davis and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

California Prison Stories

Author : Mike Enemigo
Publisher : Cell Block
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (879 download)

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Book Synopsis California Prison Stories by : Mike Enemigo

Download or read book California Prison Stories written by Mike Enemigo and published by Cell Block. This book was released on 2023-05-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: California's prison system is one of the most infamous in America. Not only because it has some of the most brutal and famous prisons in the country, but also because it houses, or has housed, some of the most notorious criminals this country has ever seen. Countless movies have been made and books written in an attempt to paint a vivid picture of this dangerous community, but none of been done as accurately as this one.In California Prison Stories, Mike Enemigo, America's #1 incarcerated author who himself has been serving life since 1999, has compiled a riveting collection of true stories, essays, articles and other writings, written from inside the belly of the beast, by those living in it, about the notorious Devil's Playground. From George Jackson's revolutionary efforts and ultimate reign of terror, to Joe "Pegleg" Morgan, the Mexican Mafia's white Godfather who ruled with an iron fist; from Crip's co-founder Stanley "Tookie" Williams' life on Death Row, to the notorious and bloody gladiator fights in Corcoran State Prison and much, much more, this book will give you a true, insider's view into one of the most brutal and dangerous places on earth, directly from those who have lived it. ...

To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back

Author : Ernie López
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 0292778198
Total Pages : 351 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (927 download)

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Book Synopsis To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back by : Ernie López

Download or read book To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back written by Ernie López and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This prison memoir vividly recounts a life of abuse, crime, and incarceration, and reveals the harrowing reality inside America’s broken prison system. When Ernie López was a boy selling newspapers in Depression-era Los Angeles, he would face beatings from his father for not bringing home enough money. When the beatings became unbearable, López took to petty stealing to make up the difference. By thirteen, he was stealing cars, a practice that landed him in California’s harshest juvenile reformatory. So began his cycle of crime and incarceration. López spent decades in some of America’s most notorious prisons, including four and a half years on death row for a murder he insists he did not commit. To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back is the story of a man who refused to be broken by his abusive father, or by America’s abusive criminal justice system. While López admits “I’ve been no angel,” his insider’s account of life in Alcatraz and San Quentin graphically reveals the violence, arbitrary punishment, and unending monotony that give rise to gang cultures within the prisons and practically insure that parolees will commit far worse crimes when they return to the streets.

American Prison

Author : Shane Bauer
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0735223602
Total Pages : 401 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (352 download)

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Book Synopsis American Prison by : Shane Bauer

Download or read book American Prison written by Shane Bauer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.