Street roots., September 21, 2018, Page 9, Image 9

Page 10
Conversation
Street Roots • Sept. 21-27, 2018
Private prison
Journalist Shane B auer has written a book about his fo u r months
inside as a security guard and the shameful legacy o f prison labor
B Y EM ILY GREEN
SENIOR STAFF REPORTER
here are few pretenses under which
it’s considered ethical for a journalist
to go undercover.
Shane Bauer used Poynter’s criteria as a
basis for weighing his decision: It has to be
in the public interest. It has to be the only
way to get the information, and any harm
that might be prevented must outweigh
harm that could be caused.
With 130,000 people held in America’s
privately run, state and federal prisons,
there is a vested public interest in
understanding how they operate. Because
the companies that
run these prisons
keep their business
practices and
operations secret, it’s
nearly impossible for
reporters to find out
what goes on within
their walls. Inmate
accounts suggest
these prisons are
operating in a
dangerous and
inhumane way, but
there’s no way to
verify inmate
E
LU accounts without
o being able to see
g inside.
“ And Bauer was up
o to the task. Just
£ three years earlier,
Shane Bauer
he was a prisoner
himself. He was held
captive in Iran for two years after he and his
friends unknowingly came too close to the
Iranian border while vacationing in
Kurdistan.
So in 2014, Bauer went to work as a
prison guard at a privately-run prison in
Winnfield, La. He used his real name, job
history and employer when he applied for
the position.
For a period of four months, he worked at
Winn Correctional Center, often bringing
with him a hidden camera and recording
device. The resulting exposé in Mother
Jones magazine won the National Magazine
Award for Best Reporting, but Bauer wasn’t
finished telling his story.
His full account appears in his book,
“American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover
Journey into the Business of Punishment,”
and Bauer will be at Powell’s City of Books
at 1005 W Burnside on Wednesday, Sept 26
at 7:30 p.m. to talk about i t
B
Released this month by Penguin Press,
“American Prison” weaves Bauer’s shocking
experience as a guard with the brutal
history of America’s penitentiary system as
he explores the evolution of using inmates
for profit
Street Roots spoke with Bauer in advance
of his visit to Portland.
Emily Green: A national prison strike
recently made headlines, and just last night in
Portland, three protesters were arrested during
a demonstration in front of a hospital (OHSU)
they said is using prison labor to wash its
linens for as little as 5 cents an hour. I was
hoping you could put modern-day prison labor
in context. Are today’s inmate laborers similar
to American prison laborers of the bast?
Shane Bauer: There’s a long history of
the use of prisoners for labor in the United
States, from the very beginning of the
prison system.
The first penitentiaries in the U.S. in the
late 18th century were essentially textile
factories, and they were intended to turn a
profit from the very beginning. A couple
decades into the creation of the penitentiary
system, these penitentiaries were actually
making money for states through the use of
inmate labor.
This labor changed over time. Before the
Civil War, in the South, prisoners were being
used to make clothes and shoes for slaves at
reduced prices for the plantations who
ownedislaves. After slavery ended, prisoners
were used to replace slave labor.
For all intents and purposes, prisoners in
the South for decades after slavery,
remained slaves. They worked on
plantations, they were whipped, and they
were often tortured for not working and for
not meeting quotas. They worked in coal
mines for huge companies, like the U.S.
Steel Company, and the work was so brutal
and they were driven so hard that they
actually died at a much higher rate than
slaves did before the Civil War. Annual death
rates in the South ranged from 16 percent to
25 percent of all convicts. It was a brutal
system, and even after this period of convict
leasing, where states were leasing prisoners
to private business and private companies,
states themselves bought plantations and
were forcing prisoners to work on
plantations. States were actually adding
money into their treasuries from these
prisons, so it was baked into the prison
system that prisoners would be forced to
work, and it was a money-making venture for
states.
Today, prisons are not bringing in money,
they cost states a lot of money. But this kind
of model of prison labor, while it may not be
as brutal as it was in the 19th century, is
still intended to offset the costs of running
prisons. Without unpaid or very poorly paid
prison labor, a lot of these prisons wouldn’t
be functioning. They are completely
dependent on prisoners to run them.
MISSISSIPPI
DEP A R TM E N T OF
ARCHIVES A N D
HISTO RY - MISSISSIPPI
STATE PENITENTIARY
(P A R C H M A N ) P H O TO
COLLECTIONS
Above, Convict
labor with the
Mississippi State
Penitentiary in
Parchman, Miss.,
1911.
E.G.: Corrections Corporation of America,
now CoreCivic, which runs the prison you
worked at, was cofounded by Terrel Don Hutto.
Why was it important to detail his background
in your book?
S.B.: Hutto, in many ways in his
■CoreCivic career. is a link between the j)ast
of American prisons and the present of this
new form of profiting from prison labor.
When I dug into Hutto’s past, I learned
that he started his career running a prison
plantation where inmates picked cotton in
an area the size of Manhattan. I found
photos of the plantations that he ran, and
they looked like you would imagine a slave
plantation to look like: White men on
horseback, standing over black men
hunched over in a field, dragging bags of
cotton.
I tried to find any kind of information I
could about what life was like on these
plantations, and I found a memoir from a
neighboring plantation where a man
described being hung by handcuffs when he
didn’t make his cotton quotas. I found
evidence later of life under Hutto and other
plantation owners where inmates would be
put on the hood of a truck and driven at high
speeds through the plantation if they
weren’t meeting quotas. There were people
who were in plantations at that time who
were electrocuted if they were not meeting
quotas. This is shocking to me that this was
happening in the 1960s and 1970s.
Hutto also lived on the plantation and had
a houseboy - an inmate who almost always
was black - who would serve him and his
family, make their beds, cook their food. He
lived this life that resembles the life, in
many ways, of a slave owner 100 years
earlier.
What was also significant about him is
that he later ran the Arkansas prison
system, which was entirely made of
plantations, and he ran that system at a
profit to the state. As far as I know, he was
the last person to run state-run public
prisons at a profit
See PRISON, page 1 1
IF YOU GO
Whafc Shane
Bauer, author oi
“American
Prison: A
Reporter’s
Undercover
Journey into the
Business of
Punishment”
Where: Powell’s
City of Books at
1005 W
Burnside
When; 7:30 p.m.
Wednesday/
Sept. 26