Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation

by Joseph T. Hallinan

The American prison system has grown tenfold in thirty years, while crime rates have been relatively flat: 2 million people are behind bars on any given day, more prisoners than in any other country in the world — half a million more than in Communist China, and the largest prison expansion the world has ever known.

In Going Up The River, Joseph Hallinan gets to the heart of America’s biggest growth industry, a self-perpetuating prison-industrial complex that has become entrenched without public awareness, much less voter consent. He answers, in an extraordinary way, the essential question: What, in human terms, is the price we pay? He has looked for answers to that question in every corner of the “prison nation,” a world far off the media grid — the America of struggling towns and cities left behind by the information age and desperate for jobs and money. Hallinan shows why the more prisons we build, the more prisoners we create, placating everyone at the expense of the voiceless prisoners, who together make up one of the largest migrations in our nation’s history.


From the Hardcover edition.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Sociology, Justice

268 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Joe Hallinan is a writer based in Chicago. He has written for many of the world's leading publications, including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and the Sunday Times of London. His most recent book is Kidding Ourselves: The Hidden Power of Self-Deception (Crown, 2014).

His previous book, Why We Make Mistakes (Broadway Books, 2009), was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It has sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

His first book, Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation, was published in 2001 by Random House. The book, which is now in paperback, was named by The New York Times as one of the year's "Notable Books." The Los Angeles Times chose it as one of its "Best Books of the Year."

Joe was previously a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and before that was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Among his journalism awards is a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

He has taught at a number of colleges and universities, and was most recently a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has appeared on a variety of radio and television programs in the U.S. and abroad, including NPR's Fresh Air with Teri Gross, The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News, CBS News Sunday Morning and the popular Canadian radio program Definitely Not the Opera.

He lives in Chicago with his wife, Pam Taylor, and their children.

Reviews

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

very interesting look how the prison system works!

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read a couple of books by the author before [1], I found it a bit surprising that he had written so much about prisons and that he had devoted himself to writing about them often.  This book is one I feel deeply ambivalent about.  Like the author, I have a considerable interest in prisons [2] going back to my youth, and though I have never (thanks be to God) been put in prison, I have visited them and taken a serious interest in their workings.  The author seems to be deeply hostile to the law and order mindset of the contemporary age, the disparity between drug offenses and other crimes, and the violence and brutality that often happen in prison, and yet the author's discussions do not always lead the reader to the sort of liberal conclusions that the author would prefer, as I read much in the book that would urge a greater focus on the power of police guards and a lessening of the civil rights of prisoners in order to improve the safety of other inmates, which is perhaps not the sort of conclusion the author himself would draw from his travels and investigations.

This book is a bit more than 200 pages and is divided into seventeen chapters.  In each of the chapters the author focuses on a different aspect of prisons in the United States and the complex ways in which our views of imprisonment have been shaped over the history of the United States.  In this book we see how criminals mostly spring from urban and minority populations but prisons are mostly in rural majority areas where they serve as vital backbones of the local economies.  We see how prisons are increasingly being run with a concern for saving money or even turning a profit, and how the sort of work that prisoners most appreciate is hard to find in some areas and also is viewed negatively by labor officials who view prison labor as a competitor to union workers in the making of worthwhile products.  We see the tension between interests prisoner rights and the protection of vulnerable prisoners that requires a certain amount of stern treatment from guards to keep order and the various ways that prisons have been viewed.  The author clearly has a bias, but he is also clearly seeking to understand the way that views of prisons and prisoners are shaped by concerns about recidivism and anxieties about safety and the expense of dealing with undesirable criminal elements.

I must admit that in reading this book a fair amount of my own ambivalence came from the fact that the author and I have a wide difference with regards to crime and punishment, but with some common concern about the rise of imprisonment to the point where more than a quarter of black men and almost a tenth of men and general will have some personal familiarity with prisons over the course of their lives.  I tend to view penalogy from the point of view of the Bible, which looks at criminals as owing a debt to their victims and not to some sort of amorphous society at large.  The author seems to think that drug penalties are too harsh, but I think that penalties for violent crimes and sex crimes are often too lenient in light of the suffering they leave behind.  Yet we can both agree that it is best when prisoners have some sort of practical work, have the opportunity for advancement and are treated and considered as human beings, if human beings who have sometimes done some very wrong things.  Perhaps if we were more reflective about ourselves, we would be more understanding towards prison and how we would want it to be if we would wish for imprisonment to be a focal point of punishment at all.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2013...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

When one segment of a nation’s population stands to gain financially from the imprisonment of another segment of the population, bad things happen. Such is the story of Going up the River. Hallinan travels across the U.S. examining the effects the war on drugs/war on crime has had on our nation. The metaphor of "war" predictably leads to mandatory sentencing, which leads to a politically easy “get tough on crime" stance which leads to a swelling prison population, which leads to privatized prisons. And when you have a for-profit prison system, watch out...there's money to be made in keeping those jail beds occupied.

[Greyson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Journalistic account of the nation's (at the time) rapidly growing prison-industrial complex industry. Emphasis on privatization and some of the players at the heart of the "market". Which...disturbing.

It seems that overall (federal) rates of incarceration are going down now, and the private-prison share of individuals experiencing incarceration is going down (according to quick research, at least). So, some hope on the horizion? Overall though, just chilling. Reads well as a precursor to Alexander's New Jim Crow, alluding to the inhumanity of the system without the brilliant framework she builds in her scholarship. At 20 years old, the book is somewhat out of date and does not touch on more recent scandals e.g. cash-for-kids. Hallinan also repeats himself across and within chapters, I would guess because some of them are repurposed from magazine articles.

Apparently for-profit incarceration companies are now "increasingly looking away from mere incarceration and are seeking to maintain profitability by expanding into new markets previously served by non-profit behavioral health and treatment-oriented agencies, including prison medical care, forensic mental hospitals, civil commitment centers, halfway houses and home arrest" (wikipedia, sorry). And companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group are now investing heavily into what some call the "immigrant detention market". This phrase should not exist.

[Badly Drawn Girl]

Should be required reading for everyone in the US. This eye opening account about our prison system shows the true cost of our obsession in regards to crime. Building more and more prisons has put many states in tight financial straits, and rehabilitation is no longer even a priority. This book doesn't preach but introduces us to a variety of people who are in the prison system in some capacity. For the most part, the reader is allowed to reach their own conclusion but it's hard to ignore that we are headed for disaster.

[Alfred Wolf · Rating 2 out of 5]

Joseph Hallinan writes about prisons as if he’s discovered fire: “look, America has too many inmates!” Thanks, Joseph, no one could have guessed, glancing at the charts showing we lock up more people than any other nation on Earth. He travels up the “prison river” like a tourist on safari, astonished every time he sees barbed wire: “wow, another prison.” The book pretends to be an exposé but often feels like the diary of someone who just realized that America’s “freedom” runs on a business model of concrete, guard towers, and contracts. It’s useful, sure, but with a strong aftertaste of “we already knew this.” Call it journalism, call it social critique — in the end, it’s packaged shock for readers who like their outrage in hardcover.

[Casey]

This was a solid overview of the American prison system. Even though this book is relatively old (published in 2001), it remains painfully relevant in 2021. It took me longer than usual to get through this book; while I found the content thoroughly researched (academic, even), much of the time it felt detached from and impassive to the day-to-day indignities and trauma this system inflicts on incarcerated people and their families. I also would have liked to see more discussion on how the intersection of race and class dictates who is locked up and for how long.

[Louis · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Cost, in fact, is the primary reason wardens argue so adamantly for televisions in prisons: not because it rehabilitates, but because, as one superintendent told me, television acts like “electric Thorazine.” It keeps the inmates tranquil, and a tranquil inmate is a cheap inmate. It applies to the rest of us too.”

[Marianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting facts about the history of the penal system and things like that. I would have enjoyed more details on the prisons and prisoners who run the prisons.

[Conrad · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read like a screed. I was hoping to get more information about life inside prison cells, but instead this book was a macro-look at the prison industry written by someone with a ridiculously transparent agenda.

[Ethan Eiss · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book does not include as many personal stories as it seemed it would based on reviews/descriptions. Hallinan is often biased, and even for cases that may seem "unfair" (as in the Groveses, who sold thousands of grams of crack, shot at one another and were constantly fighting) often actually have "merit" to their sentences. The book also focuses primarily on the Texas state prison system, which is probably the "best" to write about for a number of reasons, as well as the federal system to an extent.

Still worth the read I think most of the issues I had were relatively minor and simply due to the book being almost 25 years old.

[Jason Oliver · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only gave this book 3 stars because it is dated. This is looking at the private prison system in the United States and exploring the history of punishment, penitence, and rehabilitation.

It's a sad story of greed, cruelty, and hopelessness but also insight into why private prisons are popular. After reading this book, I learned that no federal prisons are private anymore, but I also learned that many of these companies still run state prisons and ICE facilities.

A great education of the prison system but dated.

[Audacia Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...what I found there was the perfectly evolved American prison. It was both lavishly expensive and needlessly remote, built not because it was needed but because it was wanted - by politicians who thought it would bring them votes, by voters who hoped it would bring them jobs, and by a corrections establishment that no longer believed in corrections."

This is an eye-opening, thorough book about the evolution of the prison-industrial complex (PIC) since the mid-twentieth century. The complex ugliness of prisons in America shines through stories of the individuals and institutions the author writes about. Hallinan invested a lot of time and miles to get his stories, and is a meticulous reporter. Very impressive.

The focus of the book is on the way local economies have begun to shape the creation of prisons, and it dips into the human and labor rights violations that are the backbone of the move toward inmates as factory workers. I wish there had been more stuff about the race and class dimensions of the growth of prisons, but there was some of that - including a great chapter about mandatory federal sentencing and a depressing story about a family (grandma included) all given very long sentences for drug trafficking.

I knew a bit about the PIC before reading this book, but it really lays out the details of how state and federal policy has changed to support the prison-as-business model, and how corporations have stepped up to make these institutions a dark reality.

The book made me reflect on my own work with sex workers and the complexities of bodies and labor as well. In particular, it got me angry about the fact that the anti-trafficking movement uses the rhetoric of "modern slavery," yet the PIC marches along without remotely the same kind of attention. I guess slavery is a more compelling source of outrage when it involves innocent women and children, but since convicts are imperfect victims, they get what's coming to them. The application of human rights principles is a deeply fucked up and unequal thing.

[Zena Ryder · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well-researched, well-written book, with good footnotes (which isn't always the case with books written by journalists). It is getting old now (published in 2001), so I'm now reading a more up-to-date book on the same topic. My understanding is that the American trend of incarcerating more and more people (especially black men) may be in the process of reversing. Maybe one day, the US won't be the world leader in this regard. However, even if the number of prisoners decreases, the fundamentals of imprisonment shouldn't be taken for granted:

"Many prison professionals cringe when they hear [remarks about how prisons need to be made into even worse places to which nobody would ever want to return]. They know that many prisons are already intolerable places, that they have been intolerable places for hundreds of years, and that making them more so is folly. Among their ranks is Frank Wood, the former commissioner of corrections in Minnesota. "Does it seem rational," he says, when I ask him about this trend, "that we should walk down the road, for instance, of creating in our prisons a hell on earth and aggravating the conditions of confinement to the point at which we think we will make prison so miserable that no one will ever want to come back? That's never worked anyplace."
When you take away television, when you take away weights, when you take away all forms of recreation, Wood says, inmates react as normal people would. They become irritable. They become hostile. Hostility breeds violence, and violence breeds fear. And fear, he says, is the enemy of rehabilitation. "You can't create and maintain a climate where people want to change," he tells me, "where every day when they open their cell door at six or seven in the morning they're preoccupied with their survival that day." p.103-4

[Art · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joseph Hallinan is an investigative journalist, and somewhat of a prison "tourist". This is a remarkable compilation of his American prison travel log. Interviews with inmates and prison staff are placed alongside historical accounts and anecdotal stories. In particular I enjoyed reading just how much the design and intent of Easter State Penitentiary (right here in Philadelphia) has truly impacted the prison industry up to the present day. I also have to admit that I got my outrage on reading about some of the prison practices that go on behind those walls: like guards on horseback with shotguns monitoring inmates through their cotton field work in Texas, or outdoor cages holding naked inmates in cold weather. Hallinan feels the injustice of the American criminal justice system and passes this on to his readers. He also passes on a feeling of the inadequacy of the prison system: inadequate to reform, inadequate to control continuing violence. I think that's healthy to realize that the system is limited and in many ways a failure.
I also enjoyed reading abut some of the remaining humanity within the American prisons: prisoners who paint portraits based on family photos, but who include the prisoner in the portrait who was absent from the photo. Prison rodeos (just like it sounds, prisoners on bucking broncos) in Oklahoma. And other touching stories.
This book was written just less than a decade ago, and Hallinan ends on a hopeful note, reporting about declining prison populations and about prisons that are shutting down. Unfortunately the numbers he left his readers with have since skyrocketed, and prisons remain in their boom.
As an overview of the American prison project, this book is very valuable. Thanks Katie Jo for passing it on to me!

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finally found this book; most annoyingly, as I was really enjoying it, it was lost for a good 6 or 7 weeks! I do believe I'll have to start over at the beginning, but at least I wasn't too far into it when it went missing.


Some months later:
My niece Lea recommended this book to me, after having read it for a class at Occidental College. Her prof had said that, although it was published in 2001, the issues it raised were still timely. WELL, this book, together with The New Jim Crow, presents about the saddest and most horrifying picture of our country that I could imagine! The book is particularly meaningful to me because there has been a prison built in Lovelock, NV (a town near and dear to my heart), giving me a personal view of the impact the prison-industrial complex has had on small, rural towns. The author writes well and clearly; he states facts and supports them with more facts, interspersing them with stories of real people to illustrate the issues.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last this past week I read Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation, by Joseph T. Hallman, in which Hallman gives a history of American penalism while traveling throughout the country and visiting its most pivotal prisons. One out of every one hundred Americans is in prison, which is quite a statistic: "the land of free" leads the world in incarceration, putting even police states like China to shame. Prisons are big business, and that's the point of Hallman's book. Whereas in the past prisons were thought to be "reformatories" that might fix crime, or at least a place of last resort, now they're a source of revenue. Prisoners are captive consumers and cheap labor, and the enormous facilities that keep them isolated from society are the economic backbone of counties across the nation that have seen their industries move overseas for cheap labor of their own. Now prisoners are "clients", and cities hope for their numbers to grow.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was really fascinating and an interesting read. I knew almost nothing about prisons except that one of them held my choir teacher for a few months. There are some crazy things happening in the prisons. The other thing that I had never thought about before was the purpose of prisons: rehabilitation, punishment, holding cells, etc. I still haven't formed a concrete opinion about what I think that purpose of prisons should be. I do know, however, that I never want to be in prison ever but especially in the Southern US.

[Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you don't know what goes on in prisons, this will inform you. If you don't have any strong opinions as to what goes on in them, this won't give you any. Hallinan presents only the facts of the system, and only the unvarnished accounts of the men and women who inhabit it. Which is all well and good, for the sake of objectivity, but leaves the book lacking a certain ardor. I wish this had been a little more opinionated.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for my Prison Law class. A little too breezy, but a good journalistic account of what others call the "prison-industrial complex." It covers all the facets of incarceration--including its impact on the people who work within the prisons themselves--and illustrates how the human cost of mass incarceration affects poor people, whether they are the ones in the cages or the ones with the keys to the cages.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Made me glad I'm not in prison. Made me sad that so many other people are. There are some things worse than the death penalty, and if everything in this book is true, than going to prison is one of them. If you're reaction to that is "Good, they deserve it" than you should read the book and see if your cold, dark heart softens a little.

[Steven]

Interesting overview of the American prison system, with particular attention to Texas prisons, specifically the farming prisons in the bottomland between the Trinity River and the Brazos. In other words, while the book is national in scope, it spends a lot of time on the prisons in the Houston region. Good history of the various approaches to crime and punishment over years and cultures....

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A shocking, eye-opening look at the U.S. prison system. Although this book is now more than 10 years old, I'm sure that much of what it describes is still occurring in today's prison system. While you may come away from reading this book with more questions than answers about our "justice" system, you will certainly be thinking about it for a long time to come.

[Noah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not exactly a light read, but very good. This book is about 10 years old, but it doesn't feel particularly dated. Some parts are so brutal I felt physically ill. If you care about this stuff (and if you don't, you probably should), it's a good place to start. It also makes a great complement to Newjack, giving the macro perspective instead of the personal.

[Frederick Bingham · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book about America's obsession with prisons and incarceration. The author visits prisons all over the country, from Maine to California, and documents some of the inhumane conditions he finds. He describes the absurdity of putting so many people in prison as well as the incredible expense and waste.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

probably not the best book written about prisons, but actually about prisons (as opposed to no more prisons, which isn't). it was pretty interesting for the uninformed (me). gets boring at the end, though.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every law student should read this book before 1st year crim law and procedure. It is an indictment of prisons being used as both the sole punitive remedy for crime, and it becoming an economic boon to poor, rural areas.

[Victoria Law · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lots of historical information about prisons in the U.S., but the focus is more on tracing the economic impacts of prisons with very little attention paid to race and the color(s) of who ends up in prison.

[Darrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

read this twice - fascinating look at the private prison industry and the united states detention centers in general

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good introduction to the prison-industrial complex.