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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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After a SWAT team smashed down stock-market millionaire Shaun Attwood's door, he found himself inside of Arizona's deadliest jail and locked into a brutal struggle for survival. Shaun's hope of living the American Dream turned into a nightmare of violence and chaos, when he had a run-in with Sammy the Bull Gravano, an Italian Mafia mass murderer. Join Shaun on a harrowing voyage into the darkest recesses of human existence.
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Reuben Miller, a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and now a sociologist studying mass incarceration, spent years alongside prisoners, ex-prisoners, their friends, and their families to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail. What his work revealed is a simple, if overlooked truth: life after incarceration is its own form of prison. The idea that one can serve their debt and return to life as a full-fledge member of society is one of America's most nefarious myths.
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Halfway to Nowhere
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The Undocumented Americans
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Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she'd tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell. So she wrote her immigration lawyer's phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants—and to find the hidden key to her own.
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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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Justin Brooks has spent his career freeing innocent people from prison. With You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You're Innocent, he offers up-close accounts of the cases he has fought, embedding them within a larger landscape of innocence claims and robust research on what we know about the causes of wrongful convictions.
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Feel Free
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Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.
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great material, thoroughly brilliant narration
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Discipline & Punish
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This groundbreaking audiobook by Michel Foucault, the most influential philosopher since Sartre, compels us to reevaluate our assumptions about all the ensuing reforms in the penal institutions of the West. For as Foucault examines innovations that range from the abolition of torture to the institution of forced labor and the appearance of the modern penitentiary, he suggests that punishment has shifted its focus from the prisoner's body to his soul-and that our very concern with rehabilitation encourages and refines criminal activity.
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MORE FOUCAULT PLEASE!!
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By: Michel Foucault
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The Power
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In The Power, the world is a recognizable place: There's a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power: They can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets.
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A necessary read
- By Grace on 11-22-17
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The New Jim Crow
- Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th Anniversary Edition
- By: Michelle Alexander
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
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Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times best seller list.
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Shocking, Important and Brilliant
- By Tim on 10-06-14
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Poverty, by America
- By: Matthew Desmond
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?
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A testimonial based on facts and witness
- By Alonzo Nightjar on 03-27-23
By: Matthew Desmond
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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7 people found this helpful
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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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2 people found this helpful
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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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10 people found this helpful
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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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