Behind bars

At age 63, Dave Bacle was making $9 an hour as a guard at the Winn Correctional Center, a prison in Louisiana run by the Corrections Corporation of America. A Coast Guard retiree with a portly build and salty vocabulary, Bacle wasn’t a particularly easy person to shock. But this private prison was something else. Cell doors could be popped open with ease, mental health services were practically nonexistent, and inmates frequently bloodied each other with homemade shanks. What the place needed, he told his partner, was an investigative journalist to poke around and check things out.

Bacle’s partner at the prison was Shane Bauer, a slim white guy in his 30s from California. Bauer was also a reporter for Mother Jones. In his pocket was a pen that featured a hidden recording device; his watch could secretly take pictures and video. Bauer had already spent three months at the prison, returning home to his apartment each evening to download the recordings, write up his notes, and deal with waves of anger, frustration, fear and guilt. (About one-third of prison guards suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, a higher rate than soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.)

In 2016, Mother Jones published the result of Bauer’s undercover investigation, a 35,000-word expose that ricocheted across the Internet and put CCA, since renamed CoreCivic, on the defensive. (The company called the article, which won the National Magazine Award last year, a “rehashed and predetermined premise instead of a factual and informed story.”) Now comes “American Prison,” in

American Prison

which Bauer weaves his guard experiences into a history of private prisons in America. It is a relentless and uncompromising book, one that takes a crowbar to the private prison industry and yanks hard, letting just enough daylight slip inside to illuminate the contours of the beast.

This beast is hungry, and it must be fed. Shortly after the formal end of slavery, private prisons extracted profits by working inmates — mostly African Americans — so hard that they died by the thousands each year, likely exceeding the death rates in Soviet gulags. (In 1898, nearly 1 in 5 convict laborers in Alabama perished.) After convict leasing was phased out, prisons turned profits by cutting back on even the most basic of services. At Bauer’s prison, the guard towers are empty and security checkpoints often unstaffed. The facility of more than 1,500 inmates doesn’t have a single full-time psychiatrist; one mentally ill inmate shrivels to 71 pounds before committing suicide.

Bauer’s training consists of little more than being doused with tear gas by a supervisor. At $9 an hour, the guards are also disposable, a business plan that can be fairly described as the CCA way. The company’s co-founder, Terrell Don Hutto, got his start managing a prison plantation in Texas in the 1960s. To save money, he enlisted especially brutal inmates to maintain order. Hutto then ran the prisons of Arkansas, whose plantations had started to lose money after a reformer introduced new protections for inmate laborers. Hutto gutted those protections. One inmate testified that he was stripped and left in a cell for 28 days for refusing to work in the fields. If inmates didn’t pick their cotton quota, they were subjected to various forms of torture. It was ugly, but the prisons became profitable again.

Bauer’s consuming interest in prisons can be traced to a hike he took in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2009. On the hike, Bauer, along with his partner and a friend, were arrested by the Iranian government and accused of being U.S. spies. Bauer spent more than two years in prison, including four months in solitary confinement. Back home, he struggled with PTSD and began to correspond with, and write about, inmates in the U.S. But prison is a brutal place, and as a CCA employee, it doesn’t take long for his empathy to wear thin and sometimes snap.

“The boundary between pleasure and anger is blurring,” he writes. “To shout makes me feel alive. I take pleasure in saying no to prisoners.” He finds joy in confiscating the clothing of inmates and imagines an entire unit being tear-gassed. “Inside me there is a prison guard and a former prisoner and they are fighting with each other, and I want them to stop.”

Bauer credits Ted Conover’s 2001 book “Newjack” for inspiration, which chronicled a year that Conover spent in the late 1990s as a guard at New York’s Sing Sing prison. Read together — and if you haven’t read “Newjack,” you most certainly should — the books highlight the degradation of what was already a dangerous and chaotic job. “They got to raise the pay for y’all,” one inmate tells Bauer. “If they don’t do that, this bitch ain’t never gonna change.” There was a moment when change seemed to be on the horizon. In 2016, the Justice Department announced that it planned to phase out the use of private prisons for federal inmates. After being pressured from the left, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that she wanted to end the use of private prisons at the state level, too. As the company’s stock nose-dived, Corrections Corporation of America rebranded itself CoreCivic, a move, according to a spokesperson, that spoke “to the deep sense of service that we feel every day to help people.”

Then Donald Trump won, and CoreCivic’s stock soared. Last year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed the decision to phase out private prisons. The crackdown on undocumented immigrants requires the construction and maintenance of ever more detention centers. The private prison industry is booming once again. To find out what that means for real people — both those who guard and those who are guarded — “American Prison” is the place to begin.

Gabriel Thompson is the author of “America’s Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century” and “Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do.” Email: books@ sfchronicle.com