From the Bookshelf of Around the Year in 52 Books …

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

Shane Bauer

Why we're reading this: 7/8 - Incarceration
[close] 7/8 - Incarceration

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Nov 29, 2019 Maryam rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction

Review to come

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Sep 12, 2020 Caitie rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: blm

Book 60 of 2020. This is a genre (investigative journalism) and topic (private prisons) that I'm usually very interested in but something about it just didn't do it for me. The scenes in the prison were repetitive and boring. I grew really frustrated with how much Bauer berated and punished prisoners. I understand from the Stanford Prison experiment that people in power tend to take on that persona, but there wasn't much acknowledgement of that. Towards the end of the book, Bauer's wife becomes ...more

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Jul 10, 2020 Carolyn rated it really liked it

His courage and dedication to take a year of his life to take on this project is admirable. I appreciated the context he put today's situation in by giving us history of the development of for-profit incarceration. He did a good job of giving voice to the people he worked with. I could really feel his dilemma between needing to appear tough and wanting to treat the wards as fellow humans.
Sometimes I had trouble following who was speaking to whom. His writing seemed a bit choppy in places so I w ...more

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Jan 02, 2020 Holli rated it really liked it

Super fascinating book about the history of private prisons and viewpoint of someone working as a CO. Lots of information that I hadn’t thought about before. Also, really interesting and easy to listen to. (Easy meaning good writer/reader not easy content...some pretty sad and horrible stories that were hard to listen to).

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