The author applied, and went to work in Louisiana as a guard for the Corrections Corporation of America, the private prison company. This, even though he had spent two years and four months in solitary a decade earlier in an Iranian prison. He ties in today's prison profit motive with slavery to make the point that incarcerating people has always been about money. Indeed, before the Civil War, seven of the eight wealthiest states in the Union were in the south. The 13th amendment prohibition against involuntary servitude or slavery states "except as punishment for a crime", thus allowing over a century and a half of prison populations in the south picking cotton, while being called nigger and subject to physical abuse. The tradition, thoughh goes back much further in American history. A fourth of 18th century British migrants to America were convicts transported to work in the new world. In the 19th century, most states established penitentiaries and prison labor was contracted out for profit. The Louisiana convict leasing system that flourished after the Civil War had an annual death rate of 20%, only slightly below the Siberian Gulag of the 1940's. In neighboring Alabama, the majority of the men in the coal mines and steel mills were convict labor. The conditions were horrific, but the 19% mortality rate was blamed on "the debased moral condition of the negro whose systems are poisoned beyond medical aid by the loathsome diseases incident to the unrestrained indulgence of lust now that they are deprived of the control and care of a master." Texas decided to run their own businesses and by the early 20th century, owned a dozen prison plantations. The last two states to use prisoner leasing were Alabama and Florida. Prisoner leasing was followed by a new system of abuse, one necessary to improve roads in the 20th century, the chain gang. By the early 20's, 88% of Georgia's prisoners were in chain gangs. State and federal officials reported that outdoor work was good for the physical well being of the convicts and improved their character. Until the 1970's, the southern states used inmates as much as possible to supervise the other prisoners because they were free labor. The private prison system was next in a long line of abusive treatment and an attempt to hold costs down.
This book is simply shocking. I knew nothing about the institutionalizing of Jim Crow in the prison system. The brutality and harshness of it is appalling. The chapters on the author's experience are not quite as surprising and more or less what I expected. Mixing criminals, many of them violent, with $9 per hour guards is not a recipe for a constructive exchange. The most striking thing about CCA is that it is a for profit entity focused exclusively on making ends meet, and the place where they scrimp the most is health care. CCA is paid $34 per day per prisoner and any hospital time is profit crushing. There are innumerable examples given of the denial of medical treatment that is criminal, including two stories of pregnant woman being treated so indifferently that their infants died. After the publication of an article by the author in Mother Jones, he was threatened by CCA, but was never sued. The DOJ interviewed him as they were preparing for and dropping CCA from managing any federal prisons. CCA has rebranded itself as Core Civic and substantially increased its federal business under Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions. Thurgood Marshall, Jr. is on the Board of Directors. This book is certainly not an advertisement for privatizing anything. Thanks DG for the loan of another good read.
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