The results are in! The winner of our poll – and the book we will discuss on June 3, 2026 – is American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment, by Shane Bauer. We used STAR Voting again this month, and nineteen members voted in the poll. Of our four book choices, The Color of Law and American Prison received the most stars in the scoring round and advanced to the runoff round. In the runoff round, six people ranked the finalists equally, The Color of Law received four votes, and American Prison received nine votes. Thank you to everyone who voted!
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2019 J. ANTHONY LUKAS BOOK PRIZE WINNER • HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN JOURNALISM WINNER • 2019 RFK BOOK AND JOURNALISM AWARD WINNER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2018 • ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2018
In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background check. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough, and in short order he wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award and became the most-read feature in the history of the magazine Mother Jones. Still, there was much more that he needed to say. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. For, as he soon realized, we can’t understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery, and the echoes of these shameful origins are with us still.
The private prison system is deliberately unaccountable to public scrutiny. Private prisons are not incentivized to tend to the health of their inmates, or to feed them well, or to attract and retain a highly-trained prison staff. Though Bauer befriends some of his colleagues and sympathizes with their plight, the chronic dysfunction of their lives only adds to the prison’s sense of chaos. To his horror, Bauer finds himself becoming crueler and more aggressive the longer he works in the prison, and he is far from alone.
A blistering indictment of the private prison system, and the powerful forces that drive it, American Prison is a necessary human document about the true face of justice in America.—description from the publisher Penguin Random House
“American Prison is both the remarkable story of a journalist who spent four months working as a corrections officer, and a horrifying exposé of how prisoners were treated by a corporation that profited from them. . . . It’s Bauer’s investigative chops, though, that make American Prison so essential. He dedicated his time at Winn to talking with prisoners and guards, who were unaware that he was a journalist . . . Based on his first-hand experience and these conversations, he paints a damning picture of prisoner mistreatment and under-staffing at the prison, where morale among the incarcerated and the employees was poor. The stories he tells are deeply sad and consistently infuriating . . . An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” —NPR(dot)org
“Riveting . . . Bauer himself was held in an [Iranian] prison for two years, so he knows what it feels like to be on the inside, yet he brings to the text a journalist’s purview and draws a direct line between American slavery, the founders of the prison corporations and the job he is hired to do. In a fascinating tightrope walk, Bauer shows that, in this so-called industry, the financial bottom line comes at a high human cost.” —Oprah(dot)com
“American Prison is a searing, page-turning indictment of America’s practice of corporate incarceration. Shane Bauer reports in the best way a journalist can: by going into a prison himself. But then he connects the dots, drawing a persuasive through-line from plantations worked by slaves, to Southern prison farms, to corporate prisons. With this braid of history and reportage Bauer reveals the criminal nature of private prisons, a world of pain that is also a business. His is a beautiful rage.” —Ted Conover, Pulitzer Prize finalist and director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University
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