As the prison population in America soared from 263,000 in 1976 to 1.6 million in 2009 governments tried to save money on prisons by using private corporations to run prisons (apparently the idea of putting fewer people in prison and letting more people out did not occur to anyone). Bauer worked for four months undercover as a guard at a prison in Louisiana, Winn, run by the private Corrections Corporation of America. As Bauer says, "I touch on things I saw at Winn: the violence, the understaffing, the use of force, all of which are more extreme than at publicly run prisons." The pay for guards is nine dollars an hour; there is little training.
Bauer also includes a detailed history of private prisons, especially those that were run at a profit in the South after the Civil War, essentially slavery under a different name. And now the Trump administration has reversed the Obama-era decision to stop using private prisons. Private prisons remind one of some of the other corporate scams now common in this country, especially medical insurance where, as in private prisons, the less care you provide the more money you make in a competitive environment. And society pays a price for private prisons, where there is violence and dehumanization of all concerned, prisoners and guards alike, and everyone comes out worse than when they went in.
Kudos to "Mother Jones" and Bauer for their undercover reporting, something increasingly rare after some recent court decisions, especially the decision in 1992 when ABC News was successfully sued by Food Lion for reporting on the repackaging of spoiled meat! (Food Lion asserted that the reporters were not doing their job of repackaging rotten meat!).
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