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

After being told that many inmates think he’s gay, Bauer begins working out and trying to “annihilate anything remotely feminine about me” (201). He modifies his inmate counting method as well as his stride, trying to “look tough.” One day, while patrolling tier A1, an inmate taunts him repeatedly, and Bauer snaps, calling him “Bitch ass.” He writes the inmate up for making sexual comments, and the inmate responds he’s going to file a grievance against Bauer. After calming down and trying to understand why the inmate triggered such anger in him, Bauer goes back to the tier and explains that he doesn’t have a problem with him personally, and that he sympathizes with the inmates’ plight. Bauer’s empathy diffuses the situation and puts him on common ground with the man who claims he meant no disrespect. Bauer tears up the disciplinary report which ends the confrontation.

One day, an inmate named Mason falls out of his bunk in obvious distress. The nurses and orderlies take him to the infirmary; earlier that day, he was diagnosed with fluid in his lungs but sent back to the tier a few hours later. A few days later, Mason is still in pain, complaining that they won’t send him to the hospital. CCA is financially obligated for any inmate sent to the hospital, and the company tries to minimize its health care costs at every turn. One way is refusing to accept prisoners transferred from out-of-state who have preexisting conditions or are over 65 years old. Winn also has a history of hiring doctors who have been disciplined or had their licenses suspended. They have also been sued for medical malpractice—particularly egregious is their treatment of pregnant inmates—and sanctioned for destroying evidence.

On his mandatory overtime day, Bauer is assigned to guard an inmate recovering from open heart surgery. His partner tells him he has to carry a sidearm even though he is not certified, and his lack of experience makes him nervous. Back at Winn, Bauer’s humanitarian approach with the inmates seems to be working but only until he has to enforce a boundary. He decides to shift his focus to “proving I won’t back down” (208), resisting the urge to respond to threats and taunts.

Everyone—guards and inmates alike—is frustrated by the lack of consistency and the cancelled programs. That commonality, however, does not stop the constant power struggle, and Bauer, feeling tired and fed up, segregates an inmate who he believes threatened him. Although he later questions his recollection of events, he does not regret his decision because he showed the inmate he couldn’t be intimidated. Feeling the power of his authority, Bauer walks through the tier one day looking for an inmate who insulted him and finds that Bacle has accidentally locked him inside. Fighting a rising panic, he calls for Bacle to unlock the door as inmates approach threateningly. Bacle arrives and opens the door, but Bauer’s arrogance is tempered by this close call. Later, Bacle calls a “code blue,” and he and Bauer run out to the yard to find a wounded inmate rolling on the ground and another pinned to the fence by several others. Bauer is shocked to find the offender is Brick, “a charming, gray-haired inmate who passes the time with me chatting through the bars” (211).

The wounded inmate is Brick’s “punk,” and Bauer acknowledges the complexities of the dominant/submissive dynamic between inmates—predators may or may not be gay, although their victims usually are. Federal law requires prisons to take measures against sexual assault, although the degree to which those measures are enforced is unclear. When Brick’s victim is released from the infirmary, he is placed back in Brick’s tier, even though he fears for his safety. His only other option is protective custody, but that brands him as a “snitch,” a label that could have even worse consequences. They eventually reassign him to another tier. Sexual assault is not limited to inmates, however. During training, Kenny warns all cadets about the dangers of succumbing to sexual temptation with an inmate, and he tells a cautionary tale of a former CO who sexually assaulted a transgender inmate and was now in a federal prison.

When states ended convict leasing, one way to maximize profit was to give trustees—prisoners granted certain authority and privileges—the run of the place. Some prisons armed their trustees and promised parole to any trustee who shot an escaping prisoner. Whippings, electrocution, and other abuses persisted for inmates who didn’t meet a work quota. Meanwhile, state coffers raked in millions of dollars on the backs of these prisoners.

In the 1960s, Winthrop Rockefeller, newly elected governor of Arkansas, promised to reform the state’s penal system, hiring social scientist Tom Murton to do it. In his memoir, Murton described the job of prison superintendent as making the prison profitable for the state. He compared conditions at Tucker, one of two massive prison plantations in Arkansas, to Nazi concentration camps, with a hierarchy of abusive “trustys” and the abused “rank men.”

One of the few ways rank men could earn cash—a necessary resource—was to sell their blood. One prison doctor, Austin Stough, earned hundreds of thousands of dollars by paying inmates for their blood and then selling it to a pharmaceutical company at a huge markup. Despite an outbreak of hepatitis in all of the doctor’s contracted prisons, Arkansas allowed him to continue his practice. As superintendent, Murton ended Stough’s “blood-sucking program” (224) and instituted several reforms at Tucker, including stopping the trustee program, ending whippings and electrocutions, and tearing down the squatter’s shacks where trustees had been living. Murton then did the same at Cummings, Arkansas’s other main prison plantation. As his reforms took hold, profits from prison labor declined, and Murton was fired. His replacement, Bob Sarver, tried to drive up profits by reinstituting the old abusive practices, but the prisoners sued, and Sarver was replaced by future CCA co-founder, T. Don Hutto.

While one tier of Ash unit is evacuated for a sewage backup, two inmates in another tier engage in a shank fight. After several minutes, a SORT officer arrives and pepper sprays the inmates. One is taken to the infirmary, the other to segregation. Later, Bauer talks with a white inmate out in the yard. The man reveals a Nazi insignia tattooed on his chest and admits he enjoys the rough-and-tumble violence of prison. He claims he once bit the face off of a Black inmate who tried to stab him, labeling the mostly Black inmate population “barbarians.”

At a staff meeting, Assistant Warden Parker informs the COs that they’ve been given a pay raise: $10 an hour. He also gives them a short primer on the history and mission of the American Correction Institute (ACA), described as “the closest thing we have to a national regulatory body for prisons” (231). Winn is an ACA accredited prison. At an ACA convention, Bauer reports, topics include the financial liability of suicidal and transgender inmates, how to avoid discussing difficult topics with the press, and even trade show advertisements for such industry products like “suicide-proof vent grills” (232). CCA and the ACA have a long history of overlapping interests and shared personnel, not to mention allegations—later substantiated in court—of bribery and kickbacks.

As Winn prepares for its ACA audit, the inmates and the lone maintenance man struggle to bring the facility up to code. Bauer lists the many code violations Winn is guilty of and wonders how the audit will go, although CCA has an average ACA score of 99 percent. Bauer questions the ACA standards; four years prior, at a CCA facility in Mississippi, inmates rioted over inadequate health care and bad food, and a CO was killed. The ACA gave that facility a perfect rating. On the day of the audit, ACA inspectors take a cursory walk around the facility and leave without a single in-depth interview.

The following morning, the captain reveals that someone from the outside—likely a staff member—is smuggling knives in for the inmates. Later, Bauer talks with Derik who feels overwhelmed by “a thousand motherfuckers talking and shit. That shit builds a lot of anger in me” (236). Trying to delve into Derik’s psyche, Bauer asks him about the cop he killed, and if he feels any remorse. To Derik, killing “is like a football game. It come and go. There was pain for the moment, then it’s gone” (238). The rest of Bauer’s day is a frustrating montage of defiance, taunts, and chaos.

The previous day’s confrontation with “Gray Beanie,” an inmate who lobs sexual taunts at Bauer, carries over to the next day. When Gray Beanie tries to apologize, Bauer doesn’t accept it, leading to a back-and-forth of accusations. Gray Beanie falsely claims Bauer asked for sexual favors and that “I got three witnesses” (240). Later, Derik asks him to go easy on Gray Beanie, his friend. Bauer begins to feel Derik is manipulating him, trying to earn his trust while occasionally showing his dangerous side to keep him off-balance. Bauer also questions his own motivations for being there in the first place.

The following day, during CPR training, some of the COs discuss how good the inmates have it, with their free food, free bed, free cable. As Sergeant King recalls an incident from the previous day in which an inmate grabbed him, the CPR instructor tells him: “When you write that report you were fearing for your life. Remember that” (242).