A 3-week nationwide prison strike from coast to coast just ended this month, after prisoners participated in hunger strikes and called for the abolition of what they call “modern-day slavery.”
Shane Bauer talking:
I had gone undercover in a private prison and wanted to get a really close look at what life is like inside of these corporate-run prisons. And after that, I realized that to really understand the role of profit in the American prison system, we had to go really back.
And I learned that throughout American history, prisons have been run at a profit. Our earliest prisons in the 19th century were for-profit prisons where labor was being contracted out to private companies. After slavery, the entire Southern system was privatized. Prisoners were essentially fulfilling the role that slaves had filled, working in cotton fields, in coal mines for companies like the U.S. Steel company, the world’s first billion-dollar company.
There were people—prisoners were essentially contracted to planters and forced to pick cotton. They were whipped, tortured, had to meet, quote, “labor quotas.” And this system was called convict leasing. This system was actually more deadly than slavery. Every year, between 16 and 25 percent of prisoners would die. It was on par with the death rate of the Soviet Gulags. And eventually, the states actually bought plantations themselves, so instead of sending the prisoners to private businessmen to put them to work in their fields, they would put them to work in their own plantations.
And in doing the research for this book, I discovered that the co-founder of CoreCivic, Terrell Don Hutto, started his career actually running a cotton plantation prison in Texas that was the size of Manhattan, where inmates were forced to pick cotton, meet cotton quotas. He lived on the plantation with his family. He had what was called a houseboy, an African-American prisoner who had to serve his family. He ran the Arkansas prison system, which was entirely made of plantations.
A federal judge had condemned what he called torture under Hutto. Inmates who refused to labor in the fields were put naked in solitary confinement. And he would run these plantations at a profit to the state. And it was his work and his ability to run prisons at a profit that attracted a couple of businessmen who proposed to him that they start a new company, that became the Corrections Corporation of America.
the kind of privatized system of convict leasing, the states kind of became jealous of the profits that the private businessmen were making, and then bought their own plantations. But substantively, there was very little difference. In fact, a lot of them were the same plantations.
Angola prison in Louisiana started as a—after the Civil War, a man who leased all of the convicts in Louisiana, named Samuel Lawrence James, bought that plantation, and he used convicts and put them on the plantation and was essentially able to live a life that was identical to the life before the Civil War, where he had prisoners laboring there. Then the state later bought that plantation from him and ran it as a state prison, and it is still a state prison today, and inmates still are working the fields there.
When I did a job interview, you know, they were almost trying to convince me to take the job. It was a $9-an-hour job. The main way that the company makes money is by offering lower wages than public prisons and also having low levels of staff in their prison. The company cuts corners in many, many ways, through staffing, medical care.
I met a man in the prison who had lost his legs to gangrene after spending months asking to be taken to a hospital. The company was resistant to take inmates to the hospital, because if they would, they would have to pay for it. You know, all of these things kind of affect the bottom line, ultimately. The prison was more violent than the state-run prisons, which were also very violent in Louisiana. There was, in a 4-month period, 200 weapons found in the prison.
there is enormous pressure on the people who work in these prisons. You know, most of the people that work there are just kind of poor people from the town making $9 an hour. It’s a very dangerous job. And the staffing is so low that it is literally impossible to do the duties that people are meant to do. And it, you know, has a very powerful psychological effect.
when Obama announced that the federal government was going to stop using private prisons, the stock price of CoreCivic dropped by half overnight. The day that Donald Trump won the election, the stock price rose more than any company in the stock market, probably because people assumed that Trump’s immigration policies would lead to greater immigrant detention, and private prison companies control about two-thirds of immigrant detention centers. After Trump was inaugurated, he rescinded the Obama-era decision, and the company is now doing better than it was a couple of years ago.
Actually, in the middle of that crisis, the stock price of CoreCivic rose by 14 percent. I mean, this is—immigrant detention is kind of the frontier of the private prison companies. It’s really their area of growth.
private prisons aren’t common around the world, but there are some countries that use them. The U.K. does. South Africa does a little bit. Mexico does now, and other Latin American countries do. And they’re facing a lot of the same problems that we are here.
And this is something that just I saw going back into the history, you know, that the very first penitentiaries—the whole penitentiary system was created in this country, the idea that if somebody, say, is convicted of theft, rather than being pilloried, they’d be sentenced to a time in prison. And the idea was that they would be rehabilitated, you know, have time to reflect, and then would go back to society. And they would also be rehabilitated through labor. This is the idea.
And a couple—two, three decades into the existence of penitentiaries, a lot of states were debating whether to abolish them. A lot of states were saying that it was a failed experiment, that people weren’t actually being rehabilitated, that it was actually leading to an increase of crime because people were just kind of learning from each other and going back into society.
But what saved the prison system was that in New York, in Auburn state penitentiary, a captain there decided to lease the labor of the prisoners to private contractors, and he vowed to turn them into what he called “insulated working machines.” So he instituted a regiment where prisoners were allowed not allowed to speak to each other, and whipping, which had been banned by the American Revolution, was reinstated in New York so they could whip prisoners who were shirking work. And that prison started to actually turn a profit. So other states replicated that model.
This was the early 19th century. So other states replicated this model and would take out loans and then build a prison and pay back the loans through the use of prison labor and then were making money. And it got to the point where much later, after the Civil War, some states—Alabama was making 10 percent of its state revenue through leasing prison labor.
it’s just a really brutal history. Prisoners have been whipped. There were states that would hang prisoners from their thumbs. There was a torture called watering, where a tube would be shoved down someone’s throat and they’d be pumped with water, made to feel like they were dying because their stomach was pressing against their heart.
And they were tortured for not making work quotas. And if you go back to the time of slavery, you know, slavery was a more productive system than free labor. Slaves were picking approximately 75 percent more cotton per hour than free laborers, and it’s because they were driven by torture, by the whip. So, when slavery ended, people couldn’t do that with laborers anymore. They couldn’t whip laborers anymore and drive them at those paces, but they could with prisoners. So torture continued to be used in the same way for decades.
Arkansas bans the whip in 1967. And Arkansas and many other states at that time also were saving money by using prisoners as guards. They would give guns to some of the most brutal prisoners. An inmate guard who would shoot and kill a prisoner who was trying to escape would be granted an immediate parole. And they would—prisoners would be used as overseers in the fields. They would whip other prisoners. And in Arkansas, they were even electrocuting other prisoners for not making quotas in the fields.
And in Arkansas, actually, there was a police investigation that uncovered a lot of brutality around this system, and the state then brought in a reformer to kind of change the system. He started hiring guards and taking the guns away from the prisoners. He banned the whip. And as a result, the prison was no longer making a profit to the state, and he was fired. And it was shortly after that that Hutto, the founder of CCA, was brought in to run the system, and he again brought it back on a profitable basis.
Violence is certainly higher. One of the problems is that what I found at Winn is that the company kind of cooks the books. It’s hard to know the actual rate of violence. When I was at Winn, I would note every time there was a stabbing. And when I left, I did a records request with the state of Louisiana to ask how many stabbings there were in the prison. And the number they gave me for the entire year was lower than the number that I had recorded for the four months that I was there. Similarly with suicide.
What I was really surprised by, and what I frankly didn’t know when I did this undercover investigation, was how fundamental the profit motive is in the creation of the American prison system and the growth of the American prison system throughout history, and how fundamentally intertwined the foundation of our prison system is with slavery. You know, it was created, in a lot of ways, to subsidize the slave system in the South. Prisons were being used—they were essentially factories. Throughout the country, prisons were basically factories at the time, and they were being used to manufacture clothes to sell at a discount to planters for their slaves.
And, you know, after slavery, it was a way for states to continue this system. And it was only until the 1970s that prisons were not identical to slavery. And it was just a handful of years after that system of kind of for-profit plantations in the South ended that a person who was a part of that system started this kind of new chapter, which is one of many chapters in American history, of people trying to profit from other people who are held captive.
it’s been—throughout American history, it’s been kind of a back and forth between prisons being run by private companies and being run by the states. But through most of American history, they were all for profit, whether the profit was for the companies or for the states. And now the vast majority of our prisons are state-run prisons. It’s only about 8 percent that are private. And they cost the state a lot of money. But, you know, this is something that has in the past led to prison privatization, when there is a boom in the prison population and states can’t afford to manage this rise in their prison population, so private companies will step in and say, “Hey, we can do it for cheaper.”
I don’t think it was a claustrophobia. And in some ways, I think it was maybe less daunting to me than it might have been somebody else, that prisons were kind of demystified to me. It wasn’t such a big leap for me to go back in, in some ways. But what was difficult was being on the other side and being a guard. You know, there were times—the first time I remember that I found a contraband cellphone in the prison as a guard, I really stopped, because, you know, as a prisoner, I would have taken a phone in a second and used it, and I would have never snitched on another prisoner that had a phone. And I still thought of myself, and still do think of myself, as a former prisoner. And my sympathies kind of naturally lied there.
But I had taken this job, and my job was to take things like that. So, you know, it was challenging at first to kind of be on that side, and I had to kind of—I struggled really a lot with kind of ethical issues and guilt. And I really had to turn that part of myself off. Which I think is common with prison guards. A lot of the guards that I started with, I went through training with, they generally want to be kind of good people and treat people humanely, but you quickly find that this type of interaction, where you’re locking somebody up day after day, is not a kind of normal way to interact with other human beings. And you have to, to do that job, just kind of turn off that part of yourself that, you know, would maybe make you feel guilty for some of the things you do.
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Shane Bauer
award-winning senior reporter at Mother Jones. His new book is titled American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment.
— source democracynow.org | Sep 20, 2018