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

As Bauer traces the historical antecedents of America’s penal system, he reveals a system of brutality that, while abhorrent, was initially designed as reformatory. Punishment, as preached by early Calvinists and Protestants, was seen a moral imperative—a way to atone for sins and to purge the spirit. Suffering was viewed as good for the soul, literally. According to journalist Betsy Shirley, the early use of solitary confinement, for example, was never intended as punishment but rather as a time for reflection and restoration (Shirley, Betsy. “Religious ideas shaped the broken U.S. prison system. Can they also fix it?” America, The Jesuit Review. July 17, 2020). This religious ideal of punishment as rehabilitative has persisted through the centuries, providing cover to an institution that dwarfs the rest of the world in numbers of imprisoned individuals. Shirley writes, “In almost every way measurable, the U.S. penal system is extreme,” in that it houses more inmates per capita for longer, more draconian sentences compared to other countries. While the form and administration of punishment in the United States has changed, transitioning from plantations and labor farms to what are essentially warehouses, the essentially punitive nature of criminal justice has not. The United States is the only Western democracy to still practice the death penalty, and arguments over its morality are inevitably reduced to the Biblical adage, an eye for an eye.

High incarceration rates in the United States have become so normalized, it is astonishing to realize that it is a fairly recent phenomenon. Prior to Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs, which was later intensified by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, incarceration rates were relatively stable, but Reagan’s 1984 Sentencing Reform Act drove up rates of incarceration by over 700% (Flatlow, Nicole. “Federal Prison Population Spiked 790 Percent Since 1980.” Think Progress. February 7, 2013). The War on Drugs had a law enforcement appeal and a moral appeal; it’s no surprise that Reagan’s ascendance to power dovetailed with—and was aided by—a rise in religious fundamentalism in America. Responding to a perceived decline in American morality, Reagan and the Moral Majority—an affiliation of conservative, fundamentalist Christian organizations—sought to right the ship and steer it closer to God. Drugs became a focus of their moral outrage, and Reagan’s drug war, rather than treating drugs as a public health issue, penalized it severely. Harsh sentencing guidelines imposed excessively long sentences for simple possession.

Other countries, however, chose a different path. Portugal, which faced similar problems of drug addiction, decriminalized simple possession and diverted its financial resources to treatment. Ten years later, both drug use and drug-related crime dropped precipitously (Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. New York: The New Press. 2011). The United States could have chosen the same path—reformers have argued for treatment in lieu of punishment for years—but its punitive mindset and its certainty that criminals must pay prevented any serious discussion of rehabilitation. In Malcolm X’s personal narrative, Learning to Read, he describes his time in prison during which he educated himself in the well-stocked prison library. He describes the prison as having “a heavy emphasis on rehabilitation” (X, Malcolm and Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press. 1965). Given Bauer’s experience inside the private prison system and the skyrocketing rates of incarceration over the past forty years, seeing the words prison and rehabilitation in the same sentence is an oxymoron.

The loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment which allows inmates to be used as forced labor opened the door for convict labor farms and, later, commercial enterprises like CCA. Whatever the intention of this loophole, the results have clearly been disastrous for countless individuals, disproportionately those of color. While profits from convict labor initially benefitted the state and a few individuals directly, generating enormous profits from a reconstituted plantation system, it also allowed politicians and the general public to ignore the abuses being propagated in the name of those profits. As long as the money rolled in, the torture and murder of inmates was justified. While reformatory voices cried out in protest, they were silenced in the face of the enormous wealth reaped by a few elites. Even CCA cofounder T. Don Hutto is portrayed as relatively reform-minded before he acquiesced to state pressure for higher profits. For many, the lure of ready cash is greater than the desire to protect human lives.

Ronald Reagan’s presidency saw the rise of religious fundamentalism and the obsessive trend of privatization. Reagan and his allies portrayed the federal government as a bloated, sluggish carcass unable to carry out the most basic administrative tasks. The solution, they argued, was to abdicate much of its job to the sleekly efficient free market and cut “onerous” regulations so it could run more smoothly, as if the economy were a high-performance engine. Part of that job was management of the federal prison system. The downside, which Reagan and his cohort of laissez faire capitalists failed to recognize—or chose to ignore—is that people are not widgets. The free market does one thing quite well: it enables competition which, in theory, drives innovation and keeps prices low. While low prices may be great when shopping for a car, that same cost efficiency can be deadly when dealing with human bodies. CCA’s “efficiency” results in higher rates of inmate violence, high staff turnover, low morale, and substandard wages. An unregulated free market doesn’t distinguish between commodities and people, but it’s a distinction that any ethical, moral society must make.