American Prison
A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment
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Narrated by:
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James Fouhey
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Shane Bauer
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By:
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Shane Bauer
About this listen
"An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” (NPR.org)
New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018
One of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2018
Winner of the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
Winner of the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism
Winner of the 2019 RFK Book and Journalism Award
A New York Times Notable Book
A groundbreaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in America in one Louisiana prison and over the course of our country's history.
In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for nine dollars an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background check. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough, and in short order he wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award and became the most-read feature in the history of the magazine Mother Jones.
Still, there was much more that he needed to say. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. For, as he soon realized, we can't understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery, and the echoes of these shameful origins are with us still.
The private prison system is deliberately unaccountable to public scrutiny. Private prisons are not incentivized to tend to the health of their inmates, or to feed them well, or to attract and retain a highly trained prison staff. Though Bauer befriends some of his colleagues and sympathizes with their plight, the chronic dysfunction of their lives only adds to the prison's sense of chaos. To his horror, Bauer finds himself becoming crueler and more aggressive the longer he works in the prison, and he is far from alone.
A blistering indictment of the private prison system, and the powerful forces that drive it, American Prison is a necessary human document about the true face of justice in America.
©2018 Shane Bauer (P)2018 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“American Prison reprises [Bauer’s] page-turning narrative [as reported in Mother Jones], and adds not only the fascinating back story of CCA, the nation’s first private prison company, but also an eye-opening examination of the history of corrections as a profit-making enterprise.... Bauer is a generous narrator with a nice ear for detail, and his colleagues come across as sympathetic characters, with a few notable exceptions.... The sheer number of forehead-slapping quotes from Bauer’s superiors and fellow guards alone are worth the price of admission." (The New York Times Book Review)
“American Prison is both the remarkable story of a journalist who spent four months working as a corrections officer, and a horrifying exposé of how prisoners were treated by a corporation that profited from them.... It’s Bauer’s investigative chops, though, that make American Prison so essential. He dedicated his time at Winn to talking with prisoners and guards, who were unaware that he was a journalist.... Based on his firsthand experience and these conversations, he paints a damning picture of prisoner mistreatment and under-staffing at the prison, where morale among the incarcerated and the employees was poor. The stories he tells are deeply sad and consistently infuriating... An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” (NPR.org)
“A relentless and uncompromising book, one that takes a crowbar to the private prison industry and yanks hard, letting just enough daylight slip inside to illuminate the contours of the beast.... The private prison industry is booming once again. To find out what that means for real people - both those who guard and those who are guarded - American Prison is the place to begin.” (San Francisco Chronicle)
- One of Boston Globe’s Best Books of 2018
- One of San Francisco Chronicle’s 10 Best Books of 2018
- One of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2018
- Featured in Mother Jones’ Favorite Nonfiction of 2018
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Narrated by the visionary founding member, Hell's Angel provides a fascinating all-access pass to the secret world of the notorious Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club. Sonny Barger recounts the birth of the original Oakland Hell's Angels and the four turbulent decades that followed. Hell's Angel also chronicles the way the HAMC revolutionized the look of the Harley-Davidson motorcycle and built what has become a worldwide bike-riding fraternity, a beacon for freedom-seekers the world over.
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A must for any true biker
- By Chris B on 06-20-15
By: Sonny Barger
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Hotel K (Kerobokan)
- By: Kathryn Bonella
- Narrated by: Nicholas Bell
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Welcome to Hotel Kerobokan, or Hotel K, the tongue-in-cheek nickname for Kerobokan Jail, Bali's most notorious prison. It is a dark, bizarre and truly frightening underworld of sex, drugs, violence and squalor.
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nope.
- By Nick on 08-05-17
By: Kathryn Bonella
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The Tin Collectors
- By: Stephen J. Cannell
- Narrated by: Robert Lawrence
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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L.A. police detective Shane Scully comes under investigation by Internal Affairs (derisively known as "the tin collectors") after he kills his ex-partner who was one of the mayor's bodyguards. Temporarily reassigned, so that he can remain under the department's watchful eye, Scully finds that more than his badge is at stake when he is set up to take the rap in a deadly plot of corruption and conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of the LAPD.
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Police Procedural Gone Bad
- By Chip Atkinson on 02-21-18
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The Last Good Heist
- The Inside Story of the Biggest Single Payday in the Criminal History of the Northeast
- By: Wayne Worcester, Randall Richard, Tim White
- Narrated by: Eric Martin
- Length: 6 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On August 14, 1975, eight daring thieves ransacked 148 massive safe-deposit boxes at a secret bank used by organized crime, La Cosa Nostra, and its associates in Providence, Rhode Island. The crooks fled with duffel bags crammed full of cash, gold, silver, stamps, coins, jewels, and high-end jewelry. The true value of the loot has always been kept secret, partly because it was ill-gotten to begin with, and partly because there was plenty of incentive to keep its true worth out of the limelight.
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Interesting but not the greatest story.
- By Russell on 07-21-17
By: Wayne Worcester, and others
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Detroit
- An American Autopsy
- By: Charlie LeDuff
- Narrated by: Eric Martin
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In the heart of America, a metropolis is quietly destroying itself. Detroit, once the richest city in the nation, is now its poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age - mass production, automobiles, and blue-collar jobs - Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, foreclosure, and dropouts. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark and the righteous indignation that only a native son can possess, journalist Charlie LeDuff sets out to uncover what has brought low this once-vibrant city, his city.
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WOW
- By Avid Reader and Listener on 07-09-13
By: Charlie LeDuff
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The Onion Field
- By: Joseph Wambaugh
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 18 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Hollywood. Saturday night. A broken taillight leads to a routine traffic stop. It shouldn’t have changed the lives of the four men involved, but it did. The Onion Field is the frighteningly true story of a fatal collision of destinies that would lead two young cops and two young robbers to a deserted field on the outskirts of Los Angeles, towards a bizarre execution and its terrible aftermath.
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Haunting
- By Avalon on 03-03-13
By: Joseph Wambaugh
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Picking Cotton
- Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption
- By: Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, Erin Torneo, Ronald Cotton
- Narrated by: Richard Allen, Karen White
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept. She was able to escape and eventually identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken - but Jennifer's positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars. After 11 years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his innocence. He was released after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he never committed.
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Listen for the story not the writing
- By Professor Sombrero on 06-13-09
By: Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, and others
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The Murder of Sonny Liston
- Las Vegas, Heroin, and Heavyweights
- By: Shaun Assael
- Narrated by: R.C. Bray
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On January 5, 1971, Sonny Liston was found dead in his home - of an apparent heroin overdose. But no one close to Liston believed that his death was accidental. Digging deep into a life that Liston tried hard to hide, Shaun Assael treats the boxer's death as a cold case. The result is a riveting whodunit that evokes a glorious and grimy era of Las Vegas.
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Great read
- By Diane Dodge on 09-14-19
By: Shaun Assael
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American Pain
- How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic
- By: John Temple
- Narrated by: Charlie Thurston
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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American Pain chronicles the rise and fall of this game-changing pill mill and how it helped tip the nation into its current opioid crisis. The narrative, which swings back and forth between Florida and Kentucky, is populated by a diverse cast of characters.
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Now I understand the problem
- By Amazon Customer in Sanford NC on 07-07-16
By: John Temple
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Sex Money Murder
- A Story of Crack, Blood, and Betrayal
- By: Jonathan Green
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 14 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Based on years of research and extraordinary access to former gang members, reporter Jonthan Green creates an epic character-driven narrative, drawing on first-person interviews, police reports, and court transcripts to offer a unique and engrossing work of gritty urban reportage. Magisterial in its scope, Sex Money Murder offers an extraordinary perspective on modern-day America.
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Narrator using the N word was cringe worthy
- By Bmac on 09-07-18
By: Jonathan Green
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Once a Cop
- The Street, the Law, Two Worlds, One Man
- By: Corey Pegues
- Narrated by: Corey Pegues
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
New Jack City meets Serpico in this provocative memoir of a crack dealer-turned-decorated NYPD officer - a timely reflection on the complex relationship between the police and the communities they are meant to protect.
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A POSSIBLE GOOD BOOK RUINED BY NARRATION
- By The Louligan on 05-29-16
By: Corey Pegues
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Bluegrass
- A True Story of Murder in Kentucky
- By: William Van Meter
- Narrated by: Ed Sala
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Widely published journalist William Van Meter returned to his hometown of Bowling Green, Kentucky to research this harrowing account of a horrifying crime that occurred at Western Kentucky University. In 2003, attractive college student Katie Autry was found dead in her dorm room after being raped, stabbed, and set on fire. As Van Meter delves into the facts of the case, further disturbing information surfaces.
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Excellent!
- By brooke whitehead on 01-09-23
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No Angel
- My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels
- By: Jay Dobyns, Nils Johnson-Shelton
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Getting shot in the chest as a rookie ATF agent, bartering for machine guns, throttling down the highway at 100 miles per hour, and responding to a full-scale, bloody riot between the Hells Angels and their rivals, the Mongols - these are just a few of the high-adrenaline experiences Jay Dobyns recounts in this action-packed, hard to imagine, but true story of how he infiltrated the legendary Hells Angels.
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"I would avoid this one..."
- By Chris on 12-27-12
By: Jay Dobyns, and others
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The Beast Side
- Living (and Dying) While Black in America
- By: D. Watkins
- Narrated by: Brandon Rubin
- Length: 4 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
To many in the age of Obama, America had succeeded in "going beyond race", putting the divisions of the past behind us. And then 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot by a wannabe cop in Florida; and then 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; and then Baltimore blew up; and then gunfire shattered a prayer meeting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Suddenly the entire country awakened to a stark fact: Young Black men are an endangered species.
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Excellent
- By Bruce Cline on 03-28-23
By: D. Watkins
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Left of Boom
- How a Young CIA Case Officer Penetrated the Taliban and Al-Qaeda
- By: Douglas Laux, Ralph Pezzullo
- Narrated by: Mike Dawson
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On September 11, 2001, Doug Laux was a freshman in college, on the path to becoming a doctor. But with the fall of the Twin Towers came a turning point in his life. After graduating, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency, determined to get himself to Afghanistan and into the center of the action. Through persistence and hard work, he was fast-tracked to a clandestine operations position overseas. Dropped into a remote region of Afghanistan, he received his baptism by fire.
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Too Censerord to be Enjoyable
- By Nathan on 08-26-16
By: Douglas Laux, and others
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Stuart E. Eizenstat was at Jimmy Carter’s side from his political rise in Georgia through four years in the White House, where he served as Chief Domestic Policy Adviser. He was directly involved in all domestic and economic decisions as well as in many foreign policy ones. Famous for the legal pads he took to every meeting, he draws on more than 7500 pages of notes and 350 interviews of all the major figures of the time, to write the comprehensive history of an underappreciated president—and to give an intimate view on how the presidency works.
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Today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency. Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics - and their impact on people of color - are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done. But what if we only know half the story? In Locking Up Our Own, the Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic role that some African Americans themselves played in escalating the war on crime.
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America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to tell how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker. Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look.
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Locked In is a revelatory investigation into the root causes of mass incarceration by one of the most exciting scholars in the country. Having spent 15 years studying the data on imprisonment, John Pfaff takes apart the reigning consensus created by Michelle Alexander and other reformers, revealing that the most widely accepted explanations - the failed War on Drugs, draconian sentencing laws, an increasing reliance on private prisons - tell us much less than we think.
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The true causes of Mass Incarceration
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From its terrifying opening to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.
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Life in Prison
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Stanley "Tookie" Williams, cofounder of the notorious Crips gang, is a death-row inmate. But in his two decades of incarceration, Williams has also become a respected author and activist whose dedication to ending gang warfare in the lives of inner-city children has earned him a 2001 Nobel Peace Prize nomination. In this award-winning book, which has drawn praise from educators, government leaders, and families alike. Williams describes the brutal reality of being an inmate.
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Wow
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Writing My Wrongs
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Overall
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Performance
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Shaka Senghor was raised in a middle-class neighborhood on Detroit’s east side during the height of the 1980s crack epidemic. An honor roll student and a natural leader, he dreamed of becoming a doctor—but at age eleven, his parents’ marriage began to unravel, and beatings from his mother worsened, which sent him on a downward spiral. He ran away from home, turned to drug dealing to survive, and ended up in prison for murder at the age of nineteen, full of anger and despair.
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My Inspiration
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No One Is Talking About This
- A Novel
- By: Patricia Lockwood
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Performance
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As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void.
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Funny, moving, glad to have read it
- By Terra on 05-26-21
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No Visible Bruises
- What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us
- By: Rachel Louise Snyder
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
We call it domestic violence. We call it private violence. Sometimes we call it intimate terrorism. But whatever we call it, we generally do not believe it has anything at all to do with us, despite the World Health Organization deeming it a 'global epidemic'. In No Visible Bruises, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don't know we're seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths....
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Not yet ready
- By Alyssa E. on 05-17-19
What listeners say about American Prison
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mike
- 11-20-18
Dark, entertaining, and informative.
Quite possibly one of the most entertaining non-fiction books I’ve ever read. A glimpse into the twisted world of the American prison system that will throw you into an emotional whirlwind of anger, sadness, and hopelessness.
An important read if we are ever going to fix this deeply broken piece of our society. We have 4% of the world’s population yet 1/4 of its prisoners. The goal seems to be to make prison profitable, not to rehabilitate criminals. If you are a true patriot and care about the USA, you’ll read this book!
The narration is very well done also.
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- Mev K.
- 12-05-18
Intense
Enjoyable, interesting, intense. Once I started listening on Audible, I couldn’t stop until I was completely finished. A bit too much detail on the history of U.S. prisons, but all in all satisfying. Great work by the author on exposing the truth about private prisons in America.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-02-18
A history of slavery and an explanation of how it continues.
This is an insiders account of how corrupted and despicable the American prison system is.
Everything is a commodity. Everything is a for-profit venture in a system as parasitic as ours.
Other countries such as Norway genuinely try to rehabilitate their criminals. America only seems them as yet another source of profit.
Don’t turn away. Read. We must understand how the system works if we are to fight it.
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- horsestuff
- 12-20-20
Hard to listen to
I trust that the information in this book that goes beyond the author’s first hand experience was researched and is accurate. - I have no reason to believe otherwise but haven’t done the homework myself. It’s hard to believe that people can be so cruel and hard to listen to but something we all need to know.
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- Khalie
- 04-27-20
Disheartening but real
I really appreciated the way he weaved the history of the penal system in with his story; it really gave such a broad perspective. It’s incredible how he had both a prisoner and warden mindset. Absolutely a must-read.
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- Sara R.
- 03-01-19
A story that needs to be told
This is a brave book. The writer taking his life in his hands to tell a story that would be difficult to tell from the inmates perspective.
I heard a man speak at a law school. He was a 'white collar criminal' of the low hanging fruit type. He saw what he thought was an opportunity and took it. He ended up with 18 months. Some of the things that Mr.. Bauer reports in his book are corroborated in the story I heard the WCC speak of.
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- BENJAMIN
- 02-26-19
A complete recipe of misery cooked to perfection
The book is an incredibly balanced report of the conditions at a for profit prison and a focused accounting of the history of incarceration in the United States. The narrator handles the material spot on and the book flows like a novel. Bravo!
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- LEE
- 12-11-18
It's a scary book.
Shane Bauer was brutally honest - that's why I recommend the book. He describes prison conditions and how it shaped his character in 4 short months. Prison immersion changes people, believe it.
Government allows private prisons because they're cheaper, plain and simple. By the end of the book, one understands this forward and backward.
The book gives a window into how things actually work in private prisons, the cold logic that prevails while most of the rest falls off. It's difficult for the mind to reconcile such differences, but one learns to accept them.
The scary thing is how the historical sections of the book don't support any reason to hope things are going to get better.
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- Roger
- 12-08-18
Wow!
This is an amazing investigative journey. The way the author gives historical lesson while he works as an undercover guard is fantastic. He takes a gut wrenching look at the history of warehousing people for money.
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- Jennifer Friedman
- 10-23-20
Abolish private prisons now!
This book is a fascinating, brutal and hard to put down look into private prisons. The impression it left on me will be hard to shake. CCA/Core Civic, GEO group, and their peers are evil.
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