After slavery, the entire Southern system was privatized. Our earliest prisons in the 19th century were for-profit prisons where labor was being contracted out to private companies. And after that, I realized that to really understand the role of profit in the American prison system, we had to go really back.Īnd I learned that throughout American history, prisons have been run at a profit.

SHANE BAUER: Well, I had gone undercover in a private prison and wanted to get a really close look at what life is like inside of these corporate-run prisons. Shane, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us.ĪMY GOODMAN: Talk about why you wrote American Prison. And Shane knows well about prison, both working as a prison guard in one and also being imprisoned himself in Iran for over two years. This week he published his new book, that draws upon that experience and dives much deeper into the history of making profit from prisons in the United States, starting with convict labor in colonial-era settlements. He first described what he saw in a National Magazine Award-winning article for Mother Jones. NERMEEN SHAIKH: A 3-week nationwide prison strike from coast to coast just ended this month, after prisoners participated in hunger strikes and called for the abolition of what they call “modern-day slavery.”įor more, we’re joined by a journalist who went undercover as a prison guard to document conditions at the Winn correctional facility in Louisiana, run by the Corrections Corporation of America, now called CoreCivic.ĪMY GOODMAN: Shane Bauer is an award-winning senior reporter at Mother Jones.

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