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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-10

Chapters 11-13

Chapters 14-17

Chapters 18-21

Chapter 22-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 11-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 11 Summary

Christmas in Natchitoches, LA—the town Bauer resides in during his time at Winn—boasts a parade that draws people from all over the state, and it reflects a Confederate history and culture that residents still take pride in. This culture is expressed through Civil War reenactments, a Sons of Confederate Veterans float, and the Confederate battle flag. Bauer works in the mailroom, processing and inspecting incoming letters. The supervisor, Miss Roberts, tells him that she found drugs in someone’s mail which earns her a $50 bonus. She hasn’t seen the money yet. She points out a list of banned books and periodicals, including seemingly benign titles like “Advanced Techniques for Discharging Chi Energy” and “Native American Crafts & Skills” (103). Also banned is any material relating to Black history or empowerment, yet Hitler’s Mein Kampf is permitted.

Mailroom duty requires reading all incoming letters, and Bauer is privy to a great deal of intimate information. Many of the letters speak of love, heartbreak, poverty, and aspiration—necessary reminders that inmates and their loved ones are human beings, not the animals the prison system reduces them to. Haunted by the letters and by his isolation, Bauer goes to a party at his friend Anthony’s trailer. He tries to fit in, but he cannot get the cries of loneliness and desperation out of his head, writing, “I struggle constantly to understand what my role should be. How much should I engage?” (110). He questions his own ethics as an active participant in an unfair system. Anthony and his friends get drunk, strip down to their underwear, and shoot off fireworks.

The following Monday, Bauer tells Miss Roberts about one of the letters, a suicide threat, but Miss Roberts tells him to forget it. During his final phase of training, Bauer is warned about the potential for job-related mental stress. The rate of suicide among correctional officers is “two and a half times more than the population at large” (112). Bauer’s training officer, a former Marine, laments the facility’s budget cuts and low morale as well as recent restrictions on beating prisoners. Later, Bauer encounters an inmate who passes along some advice: “Just know at the end of the day, how y’all conduct y’all selves determines how we conduct ourselves” (115).

The next day, while searching bunks and lockers, Bauer finds a cell phone hidden under a water fountain. His duty requires he confiscate it, but as a former prisoner he feels guilty about taking away an inmate’s ability to connect with the outside world. He weighs the pros and cons: If he leaves it, he wins the inmates’ respect; if he confiscates it, he proves his worth as an employee. He ultimately decides that not blowing his cover is the higher priority, and he takes the phone. That evening, he meets a former Winn CO who assures him that, by confiscating the phone, “you made a lot of enemies” (117).

On his final day of training, Bauer attends a staff meeting during which an assistant warden discusses improvement strategies, like confiscating do-rags and enforcing dress codes. Later, Bauer is assigned to Ash unit where the unit manager gives him a key, a level of trust not normally given to a cadet. Bauer feels the power of authority in his hand.

Chapter 12 Summary

In the antebellum South, former plantation owners scrambled to recover their lost wealth. Edmund Richardson, a Mississippi plantation owner, used leased convicts to rebuild his cotton empire, eventually producing over 12,000 bales a year. Other Southern states leased their convicts to railroads and mining operations, and with newly freed black men rapidly entering the prison system, Louisiana opted for the same approach. Samuel Lawrence James acquired the rights to all state prisoners, purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars of manufacturing machinery, and converted the state penitentiary into a massive factory producing shoes, cotton cloth, bricks, and molasses barrels. Short on labor, James brought in Chinese laborers from Alabama to fill the demand. Soon, he realized it was more profitable to “subcontract” the inmates out to labor camps where they built levees and railroads. Although the state legislature tried to ban the practice, fearing James had become too powerful and might rob free citizens of jobs, James ignored them. Across the South, convict leasing became big business with virtually no restrictions on how many hours inmates could be forced work or what kind of labor they could be forced to do. The demand for—and profit from—prison labor became so great that state revenue from convict leasing was “nearly four times the cost of running prisons” (123).

In order to keep the labor and the profits flowing, states enacted strict new laws assuring that even small crimes resulted in longer sentences. Convicts were often employed in the most dangerous labor and under the most inhumane conditions, including being forced to drink from the same water source they use as a toilet. The labor was so brutal that records tell of inmates maiming themselves to avoid the work. Convict leasing was also highly unpopular among the local communities, with some even harboring escaped inmates or testifying in court against the owner of one of the largest labor camps in the state.

On James’s Louisiana plantation, the disparity between his wealth and the squalid conditions and meager food rations of the convicts was appalling—simply slavery by another name and even worse in some respects: “A convict under James’s lease was more likely to die than he would have been as a slave” (129). In fact, the mortality rate of leased convicts was nearly 20 percent compared to 1 percent in states without convict leasing. Before the war, plantation owners had an incentive to keep their slaves healthy, but with a virtually limitless supply of convicts, the dead ones were easy to replace.

Chapter 13 Summary

On his first official day as a CO, Bauer is stationed on suicide watch. He reports that one-third of Winn’s inmates have mental health problems, and the prison has no full-time psychiatrist and only one full-time social worker, Miss Carter. Inmates suffering from depression or other mental health issues have limited options: try to get an appointment with Miss Carter or the psychiatrist, which is difficult because of their huge caseloads, or request to be put on suicide watch.

Some guards on suicide watch are very loose with regulations, approximating times in the logbook or not even watching the prisoners at all. Cells designated for suicide watch are sparse, with no mattresses on the bunks and inmates fed even less than the general population. With one guard assigned to only a few prisoners—there are only two cells designated for suicide watch—Winn has a financial incentive to keep these cells empty as frequently as possible. While on duty, Bauer deals with a variety of issues, from anger over lack of privacy to denied requests for mental health care and possible schizophrenia. When Bauer reports every inmate complaint to the key officer as he is required to, she reprimands him for leaving his station. The emotional toll on Bauer is draining.

Kenny is hospitalized one day after an inmate assaults him for confiscating a phone. Meanwhile, Bauer is stationed regularly in Ash unit, the tier in which he took the hidden phone. He tries to assuage the inmates’ anger by telling them he had no choice and suggesting “they should try to hide their contraband better” (137). He is partnered with Bacle, a 63-year-old CO who is putting in his hours until he can retire. Bacle becomes a mentor of sorts, advising Bauer to establish a rapport with the inmates.

Inmate orderlies play a key role in the smooth operation of the prison. While they are singled out for special duties, orderlies make it clear to the other inmates that they are not in cahoots with the guards, often smuggling in contraband as proof of their loyalty. Bacle advises compromise to deescalate tense situations, a necessary bending of the rules due to staff shortages. COs take other shortcuts as well, such as using inmates as lookouts for administrators or ignoring the metal detector when it goes off.

At a staff meeting, Assistant Warden Parker complains once again about dress code violations. He chastises the COs for letting inmates get away with clothing infractions, arguing that they need to be “institutionalized” not “individualized,” equating them to a herd of cattle. Despite Parker’s numerous plans to fix the problems at Winn, he never focuses on what Bauer considers the most pressing problem: staff shortages. He suspects—and later confirms—that Winn is short of its contractual obligations, forcing the current staff to work overtime with few breaks. Ranking officers are expected to falsify logbook entries to create the appearance of legal compliance. Winn’s requests for more funding are routinely denied by CCA’s corporate office.

That day, Bauer and Bacle team up with Edison, a former Army Ranger and police chief who believes the solution to Winn’s problems is harsher discipline: “’When I went to work [as a police officer], I went to war’” (147). Edison’s anger encompasses a whole range of issues, from the low pay to mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug violations. During the daily count, Edison antagonizes an inmate which sets the entire tier on edge, with inmates shouting threats and taunts.

Chapters 11-13 Analysis

As Bauer transitions from training to actual duty, he is sometimes forced to choose between maintaining his cover and violating his personal ethics. Every day brings a new challenge, from looking the other way at code violations to struggling with how to handle a suicide threat outside the prison. The insights of the Stanford Prison Experiment are relevant in many ways. The dynamics of dominance and submission alter personalities, and the devaluation of workers results in the devaluation of those in their charge. It’s no secret that respecting and valuing employees increases morale and productivity. Paying employees a barely livable wage to work under dangerous and demoralizing conditions is a recipe for abuse. COs angry about the low pay inevitably vent their rage at the easiest target: inmates who also disrespect them. What emerges from this stew of frustration is a power struggle between two groups, both with wounded pride and both striving to have their humanity recognized. Meanwhile, the real power brokers, CCA’s top brass, enrich themselves in the process. When a company’s business model is only the bottom line, its employees become chattel, trapped between a faceless corporation that views them merely as cogs and an impossible job which they are ill-equipped and ill-trained to handle. Thus, Winn’s staff has two default responses: brutality and apathy.

Continuing his historical overview, Bauer notes the all-too-predictable rise in the prison-for-profit model. A few industrious entrepreneurs in the post-Civil War years capitalized on society’s fear of crime and local governments’ desire to wash their hands of the cost of managing its prison population. Relegating prisoners to the cotton fields or, worse, the railroads, levees, and mines, accomplished two things: It provided convict lessees with free labor, and it removed deplorable working conditions from the sight of the general public. To seal the deal, political rhetoric degraded the humanity of inmates, reducing them to brutish animals. Polite society wanted nothing to do with their care or management. The rationale was that it was better to pay someone to take inmates far away where the general population could conveniently forget about them. Even today, politicians and the media create an exaggerated fear of crime which results in ever higher levels of incarceration. In his book, The Culture of Fear, University of Southern California sociologist Barry Glassner notes that, despite eight consecutive years of declining crime prior to 2004, media coverage of crime increased, convincing viewers that “random, violent crime was a persistent and structural feature of American society” (230). This toxic mix of fearmongering and dehumanization created a system of brutality and profit largely ignored by the American public.