American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

After a standard procedural search of the cadets, Bauer describes a walk through the prison facility. He describes the chain-link entryway, the visitation building, the infirmary, the recreation yard, the chow hall, and the canteen or prison store. There are five incarceration units divided according to such qualifiers as threat level, age, or trustee status. The cadets tour the “Elm” unit, dormitory-style rooms with showers, lockers, and toilets arrayed in an X pattern with a control room known as the “key” at its hub. Each “tier” also has a microwave, a TV room, and a “JPay” machine for downloading music and sending emails. The Winn staff is diverse, a majority-Black mix of men and women, but the “floor officers,” those tasked with direct contact with inmates, are exclusively men. The ratio of inmates to floor officers is 176-1.

Following the tour, the female cadets assemble in Elm’s key while the men perform a strip search of the inmates. Then, the cadets search the beds and lockers. While Bauer tries to conduct his search respectfully, Kenny tells him to “pull everything out of the lockers and leave it on the beds” (45). Another cadet, Collinsworth, takes joy out of ransacking the inmates’ possessions. After finding contraband in one inmate’s mouth—possibly Xanax—he takes the cadets outside and offers them the pills.

The training routine becomes dull, and Bauer is careful not to reveal too much personal information to his fellow cadets. He has an odd conversation with Miss Blanchard, a training officer who openly acknowledges CCA’s meager pay and its willingness to hire anyone with a valid ID. Later, Bauer and the other cadets attend a ceremony in which inmates graduate from trade school. He encounters Robert Scott, a wheelchair-bound inmate who lost his legs and fingers while incarcerated at Winn. Scott is suing Winn for negligence. Following the ceremony, the inmates are ordered to sit down and wait for a strip search, but with only the cadets and a skeleton crew on hand the inmates do as they please; one even boasts to Collinsworth, “Ain’t no order here. Inmates run this bitch, son” (53).

Bauer and the other cadets discuss the black-market economy inside the prison, in which inmates use outside connections to accumulate money on prepaid currency cards called “Green Dots.”. One inmate flashes a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills to one of the COs, contrasting his illicit wealth with her meager pay.

The commercialization of the penal system has a long history. Prior to the American Revolution, British convicts were sold into indentured servitude and banished to the American colonies to work off their sentences on plantations. The British government paid these private merchants 5£ per prisoner to transport them across the Atlantic and sell them off—often a preferable sentence to hanging. “Convict servitude” was advantageous for the British government, providing free labor which increased plantation output and profit for the Crown.

After the revolution, the death penalty, widely imposed even for lesser crimes, was replaced by hard labor carried out in public. This experiment was difficult to regulate, however, as convicts often escaped. Even more problematic was the perception that public labor by convicts would devalue all forms of labor in the eyes of law-abiding citizens and therefore threaten American capitalism. Declaration of Independence signatory Benjamin Rush argued that this form of penal labor should be conducted out of public view. Thus, the modern penitentiary was born, an institution intended for long-term “rehabilitation” rather than short-term detention while awaiting punishment. The penitentiary was seen as reformatory, rehabilitating prisoners with work rather than simply punishing them. However, the product of their work was soon commoditized, and since profits from convict labor were allocated to the counties that incarcerated those convicts, the state had a financial incentive to arrest and incarcerate as many people as possible.

By the turn of the 19th century, many believed that the penitentiary experiment was a failure. Having fought a revolution against tyranny, reformers argued that convict servitude was antithetical to the American experiment and a continuation of the Crown’s worst practices. Furthermore, they saw the institution not as rehabilitative but exactly the opposite. Gathering large groups of criminals together in one place, they believed, only bred more crime. The reformers lost the battle, however, when enslaved people were freed after the Civil War. White Americans, fearing these newly emancipated Black Americans, saw the penitentiary system as a way “to enforce compliance and obedience of freed African Americans” (59). The added benefit of unpaid free labor ensured the system’s survival.

With a history of strikes and violence, the penitentiaries brought back strict discipline in order to tamp down unrest and make these institutions profitable once more. The liberal use of the lash turned penitentiaries into silent “catacombs,” its workers submissive machines of production. French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, after reviewing America’s penitentiaries, warned of complete privatization, arguing that the bottom line would potentially supersede the well-being of inmates. Tocqueville’s warnings were ignored.