To prison with a purpose
After two-year incarceration in Iran, Bauer goes inside U.S. justice system
journalist least Depending likely Shane person on how Bauer to be you is investigating either look at the it, Oakland most what or really goes on inside private prisons. Imprisoned himself for two years in an Iranian prison after being arrested while hiking on the Iran-Iraq border in 2009, Bauer returned to the United States in 2011 and began examining the inhumane practice of long-term solitary confinement. When he realized that America’s growing private-prison percent of all to inmates) reporters industry was than (which even public houses more institutions, impenetrable 8 Bauer decided to embark on an undercover reporting experiment to better understand the ethically confounding state of corporate incarceration. Using his own name, he applied and was hired as an entrylevel, $9-hour guard at Winn Correctional Center in rural Wingfield, La. “Am I really going back to prison?” he writes in the introduction to his eye-opening
and troubling new book, “American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey Into the Business of Punishment.”
An even deeper dive into the four-month undercover experience he first detailed in an extraordinary, 35,000-word 2016 Mother Jones story, Bauer’s book is a searing indictment of the corruption and cruelty rampant in a system with postslavery origins that is based not on rehabilitation but profitability.
In an interview near Lake Merritt, Bauer discussed why he was drawn back inside a prison, how the undercover experience rattled his sense of self and how the private-prison industry is thriving under President Trump. Q: Why did you want to report from inside a private prison? Was going undercover the only way to see what’s really going on in this notoriously opaque system? A: I had been writing about prisons and the criminal justice system for a few years and was constantly hitting walls to get access. It became clear that private prisons were the least accessible. Public-records laws often don’t apply because they’re companies, not state institutions. I had the idea to get a job inside to really get a look at the granular level of day-to-day life. And to ask, What does it mean when there’s a corporation making money out of locking people up? Q: Isn’t having a profit motive fundamentally problematic? It’s definitely a very different goal than rehabilitation. A: I think it’s important to not take the kind of prison system we have today as a given. It was something that was invented here in this country, has floundered many times, and part of what has kept it alive throughout American history is that companies and states were making money on their prisoners, not because it was necessarily keeping society safe or rehabilitating people.
The unique issues that arise with for-profit prisons derive from the need to cut corners to keep costs low, and the main way to keep costs low is through staffing. Fewer staff, lower pay. There were days when I was one of 24 guards in a prison of 1,500 inmates. They weren’t even meeting their contractual obligations, which were already very minimal. Q: People might be astonished to learn that after being a prisoner yourself in Iran for two years, you decided just a few years later to re-enter a prison at all. How are the experiences connected? A: I don’t think I would have written about prisons in the U.S. if it weren’t for that experience. I was released in 2011, and with the Arab Spring under way, I thought I’d probably keep working in the Middle East, but when I got back to California there was a huge hunger strike in prisons here. Thousands of inmates were protesting the use of long-term solitary confinement. I had been in solitary for four months myself, and I kind of got pulled into the subject, especially after finding out we had people in solitary for decades who hadn’t committed violent crimes. Q: Were you surprised by how easy it was to get hired by CCA (Corrections Corp. of America)? You describe the interview process as farcical, that because the pay is so low they’ll basically take anyone. A: Yeah, they’re desperate. It was almost like they were trying to convince me to take the job — and I had zero qualifications. It was just boilerplate interview questions that you’d get at Walmart. How do you work with others? What do you do if your boss wants you to do something you don’t want to do?
Q: How paranoid were you about being found out? Didn’t you feel they were just one Google search away from discovering who you are?
A: I had a cheap wristwatch with a tiny camera on it, and bringing it through security the first couple times was really stressful, but after a while I realized they weren’t going to notice.
There was actually a time when an instructor was sick and the head of training was trying to get ahold of me, so she searched me on Facebook, but she thought my name was Shawn, so she didn’t find me. I always knew that it was a possibility that it would just be over in a second. Q: You write about how quickly you acclimated to the violence you witnessed, and that being a guard hardened you. How were you changed by these experiences? A: I was surprised by how authoritarian I became, to a point of being obsessed with various, petty battles that I had with various prisoners. It showed me that the person I understand myself to be is so dependent on the outside circumstances that I’m in. Q: Obama’s Department of Justice decided to phase out the use of federal private prisons, but that’s been reversed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. How have private prisons been affected by Trump’s presidency? A: The day Trump was elected, CoreCivic (formerly CCA) stock rose more than any other company in the stock market. I think investors assumed that he would be cracking down on immigrants. Immigrant detention is kind of the frontier for private-prison companies. These companies are experiencing very healthy growth right now.