Beatings. Stabbings. An escape. My four months as a private prison guard
The biggest investigation Mother Jones has ever published.
We know little about life in corporate-run prisons. I took a job as a guard to get inside. Then things got crazy. https://t.co/5fQzA7fS4f
— Shane Bauer (@shane_bauer) June 23, 2016
I started applying for jobs in private prisons because I wanted to see the inner workings of an industry that holds 131,000 of the nation's 1.6 million prisoners. As a journalist, it's nearly impossible to get an unconstrained look inside our penal system. When prisons do let reporters in, it's usually for carefully managed tours and monitored interviews with inmates. Private prisons are especially secretive. Their records often aren't subject to public access laws; CCA has fought to defeat legislation that would make private prisons subject to the same disclosure rules as their public counterparts. And even if I could get uncensored information from private prison inmates, how would I verify their claims? I keep coming back to this question: Is there any other way to see what really happens inside a private prison?CCA certainly seemed eager to give me a chance to join its team. Within two weeks of filling out its online application, using my real name and personal information, several CCA prisons contacted me, some multiple times.
They weren't interested in the details of my résumé. They didn't ask about my job history, my current employment with the Foundation for National Progress, the publisher of Mother Jones, or why someone who writes about criminal justice in California would want to move across the country to work in a prison. They didn't even ask about the time I was arrested for shoplifting when I was 19.
This is how it begins but you'll need to read the rest of Shane Bauer's piece to learn about the thoroughly ineffective ways our taxpayer dollars are being used to pad the pockets of the private prison industry and to insure that they perpetuate our mass incarceration debacle by insuring that no rehabilitation occurs and recidivism rates remain high.
Comments
I couldn't make it
more than two weeks.
I was employed as a RN at a state run prison in southern Michigan. It took less than a week to understand that job creation and protection for the union guards was more important than the welfare of those incarcerated. It took one more week to understand that if I wanted to remain in the position I had to accept that the prisoners were of lower regard than the homeless who live in the surrounding area. My moral and ethical beliefs would not allow me to return for a third week.
Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.
I expect the prison industry to rush to make it illegal
to write about your time as a prison guard. Thanks for the link and the introduction, bookmarked for later.
There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties.. This...is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.--John Adams
I wonder
if that would have a paradoxical effect where people would be more eager to share their stories as private prison guards. We're a strange species, more interested in doing things we're told we're not supposed to than if we're told it's fine to do it.
Heh, I did 13 years before an injury put me on the beach...
I did it for the state, and as bad as it was there, the horror stories I would hear from the new hires that came from either private or Arizona corrections were pretty horrible.
In all honesty, I still miss the job at times. It may have sucked, but it was incredibly exciting at times too.
I guess it takes different types.
"I used to vote Republican & Democrat, I also used to shit my pants. Eventually I got smart enough to stop doing both things." -Me
I heard a story
Think it was from the husband of one of my other half's friends. Guy tried attacking one of the guards at a place he was a guard at, but was apprehended and roughed up by some of the tougher prisoners, because they liked that guard. Betting that kind of stuff doesn't happen at private prisons.
Yeah, It is an odd place and Respect is even more oddly given
in Prison.
I worked the STG (Security Threat Group) unit for many years. One thing that will always stick with me was the time two inmates came up to me and told me something might be jumping off (riot) and if it did to duck into their "House" and slide under the bottom rack and that they would already have a blanket hanging there over the edge to conceal me.
They never told me specifically why they would do so other than to say, "You've always been straight up with us, even when you had to be a dick..."
I think they can tell those that do the job because they get off on the power and those that are doing it just because it's a job.
"I used to vote Republican & Democrat, I also used to shit my pants. Eventually I got smart enough to stop doing both things." -Me
Wish we had
a lot less guys who got off on power getting into positions of power. Wonder if that'd reduce the average amount of prison riots or fights at all.
I would say that your thought is probably correct.
A lot of major incidents I could trace back to an initial spark that wouldn't seem relevant.
For example, we had an officer on day shift that neither the staff or the inmates could stand. (Both called him Percey, the evil bastard from The Green Mile).
An inmate was on the phone with his family when lock-down was called. (He was obviously receiving some very bad news I later learned.)
Rather than deal with him on an individual level and even bother to ask why the inmate didn't lock down when it was called (he gestured for 2 minutes apparently when the C/O yelled for him to "Get off the fucking phone!".
To make a long story short, rather than de-escalate the situation, he caused it to escalate.
Later that same day, that same inmate lashed out at another officer in the chow hall over the officer telling him to pull up his pants (He was "Sagging").
The end result? 5 inmates and one officer ended up in medical getting shotgun pellets plucked out of them as well as various other injuries.
Do I know for certain that this same event wouldn't have happened if the officer have tempered his enforcement with a touch of compassion? Who knows...
But I am certain that the likelihood would have been less.
We (Law Enforcement agencies) spend way too much time on defensive tactics and how to gain physical compliance and no where near enough on psychology and conflict resolution techniques. (Which is near none in most departments.)
It's one of the many root problems that we need to correct in order to fix the problems in our criminal justice system.
I wrote a blog about it over at TOP that I really should bring over here along with some of the things I expanded upon in the comments, it had a great discussion following it, but that was back when you could actually engage in one of those over there.
"I used to vote Republican & Democrat, I also used to shit my pants. Eventually I got smart enough to stop doing both things." -Me
There is a show on A&E, "60 Days In", about life as an inmate.
The sherrif sent 6 volunteers into jail to experience and report on living conditions in his jail. Scary, really scary sh1+ -- real Lord of the Flies sh1+.
Season one just ended but it's probably on On-Demand.
Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.
Simply amazing
I recommend that everyone read the entire article. Words can't describe.
True journalism
When I was a kid, Republicans used to red scare people, now it's the Democrats. I am getting too damn old for this crap!
Yes, a long read but well worth it
I love how CCA says they question Bauer's professionalism!!
Reading the Editor's note, Why We Sent a Reporter to Work as a Private Prison Guard, they remarked on Ten Days In a Mad-House (In 1887, a 23-year-old journalist got herself checked into the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island in New York City. When she emerged, she wrote about ...) I will have to finish reading that tomorrow, it's late ...