American Prison Quotes

“Like prison systems throughout the South, Texas's grew directly out of slavery. After the Civil War the state's economy was in disarray, and cotton and sugar planters suddenly found themselves without hands they could force to work. Fortunately for them, the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, left a loophole. It said that 'neither slavery nor involuntary servitude' shall exist in the United States 'except as punishment for a crime.' As long as black men were convicted of crimes, Texas could lease all of its prisoners to private cotton and sugar plantations and companies running lumber camps and coal mines, and building railroads. It did this for five decades after the abolition of slavery, but the state eventually became jealous of the revenue private companies and planters were earning from its prisoners. So, between 1899 and 1918, the state bought ten plantations of its own and began running them as prisons.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“The United States imprisons a higher portion of its population than any country in the world. In 2017 we had 2.2 million people in prisons and jails, a 500 percent increase over the last forty years. We now have almost 5 percent of the world’s population and nearly a quarter of its prisoners.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“How many times have such meetings been held throughout American history? How many times have men. be they private prison executives or convict lessees, gotten together to perform this ritual? They sit in company headquarters or legislative offices, far from their prisons or labor camps, and craft stories that soothe their consciences. They convince themselves, with remarkable ease, that they are in the business of punishment because it makes the world better, not because it makes them rich.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“When I get home, I draw a bath. I pour a glass of wine, then another, and another. I try to empty my mind. Inside me there is a prison guard and a former prisoner and they are fighting with each other, and I want them to stop.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“By 1890 some twenty-seven thousand convicts were performing some kind of labor in the South at a given time. States had enacted new laws that ensured that thousands of black men were being sent to labor camps. In 1876 Mississippi passed its “pig law,” which defined theft of any property over ten dollars in value, or cattle or swine of whatever value, as grand larceny, with a sentence of up to five years. After its adoption, the number of state convicts quadrupled from 272 in 1874 to 1,072 three years later. Arkansas passed a similar law, as did Georgia, whose numbers increased from 432 in 1872 to 1,441 in 1877. Nearly all of these “new” convicts were black. Some states ensured more years of work by charging convicts for the “cost of conviction.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“Three years later the Civil War ended, and 4 million African Americans were freed. Before the war began, seven of the eight wealthiest states in America were in the South. The American brand of slave labor was the most productive system of nonmechanized cotton production the world had ever known, but now the South’s economy was in ruins.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“CCA finds ways to minimize its obligation to provide adequate health care. At the out-of-state prisons where California ships some of its inmates, CCA will not accept any prisoners who are over sixty-five years old, have mental health issues, or serious conditions like HIV. The company's Idaho prison contract specified that the 'primary criteria' for screening incoming offenders was 'no chronic mental health or health care issues.' The contracts of some CCA prisons in Tennessee and Hawaii stipulate that the states will bear the cost of HIV treatment. Such exemptions allow CCA to tout its cost efficiency while taxpayers assume the medical expenses for the inmates the company won't take or treat.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“We have about eighty thousand people in solitary confinement in this country, more than anywhere in the world. In California’s Pelican Bay state prison alone, more than five hundred prisoners had spent at least a decade in the hole. Eighty-nine had been there for at least twenty years. One had been in solitary for forty-two years.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“Are the soldiers of Abu Ghraib, or even Auschwitz guards and ISIS hostage-takers, inherently different from you and me?”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“Between 1718 and 1775, more than two-thirds of convicted felons were transported from Britain to America, some fifty thousand in total. Approximately one-quarter of all British immigrants to America in the eighteenth century were convicts.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“Prisoners drank water piped in from the river, the same river that other convicts located upstream used as a toilet. “[I]t is a water that no population of human creatures inside or outside of the prison walls should be condemned to drink,” the inspector wrote. Rows of coke ovens outside their barracks turned the coal into the carbon-rich fuel coal companies used to produce the steel for the railroad tracks it was laying throughout the South. Convicts breathed gas, carbon, and soot from the stoves every night. The emissions killed the trees for hundreds of yards around. Yet according to a report by Alabama’s inspector of convicts, the high mortality rates were based not on the conditions of their incarceration but on the “debased moral condition of the negro . . . whose systems are poisoned beyond medical aid by the loathsome diseases incident to the unrestrained indulgence of lust . . . now that they are deprived of the control and care of a master.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“So black women were mixed with male prisoners and subsequently some became pregnant. It’s not clear whether their children’s fathers were other inmates or prison officials, but this detail was not important to legislators who, in 1848, passed a new law declaring that all children born in the penitentiary of African Americans serving life sentences would become property of the state. The women would raise the kids until the age of ten, at which point the penitentiary would place an ad in the newspaper. Thirty days later, they would be auctioned on the courthouse steps “cash on delivery.” The proceeds were used to fund schools for white children.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“legislators who, in 1848, passed a new law declaring that all children born in the penitentiary of African Americans serving life sentences would become property of the state. The women would raise the kids until the age of ten, at which point the penitentiary would place an ad in the newspaper. Thirty days later, they would be auctioned on the courthouse steps “cash on delivery.” The proceeds were used to fund schools for white children.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“Under the convict lease system, private companies had been torturing and slaughtering black men for decades. It took the murder of a white man for the country to pay attention.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“In prison I had become accustomed to one or two stimuli at a time: the book I was reading, the sound of footsteps coming down the hallway, the noises Josh was making on the other side of the cell. The free world is infinitely complex, and for a while it all came at me in a jumble. It was difficult for me to filter out what was important from the constant background noise of daily life. I also had to rebuild the mental capacity to make choices. After dreaming of food for two years, I found myself staring at menus, unable to decide what to eat, so I relied on other people to choose for me. I was constantly on edge, tense to the point of breaking. I sometimes had to leave crowded places suddenly. Other times I couldn’t handle the oppressive feeling of being in a room alone. I had nightmares nearly every night about being thrown back into prison.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“I think I was born to experience everything that life has to offer. Some of it I wish I could have missed.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“We take comfort in the notion of an unbridgeable gap between good and evil, but maybe we should understand that evil is incremental - something we are all capable of given the right circumstances.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“Fifteen years after slavery was abolished, one in five New York prisoners would be black, their representation behind bars nearly ten times greater than it was in the population at large.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“In 2018, private prisons oversee about 8 percent of the country’s total prison population.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“I find a list of books and periodicals not allowed inside Louisiana prisons. It includes Fifty Shades of Grey; Lady Gaga Extreme Style; Surrealism and the Occult; Tai Chi Fa Jin: Advanced Techniques for Discharging Chi Energy; The Complete Book of Zen; Socialism vs Anarchism: A Debate; and Native American Crafts & Skills. On Miss Roberts's desk is a confiscated book: Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power... She says this book is banned because it's considered "mind-bending material," though she did enjoy it herself.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“Cracking down on black political consciousness in prison is common nationwide. In Texas, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and David Duke’s My Awakening are allowed, but books by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright are banned.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“The legislature insisted the penitentiary be racially segregated, but the lessees had resisted, saying it was impractical and would reduce productivity. So black women were mixed with male prisoners and subsequently some became pregnant. It’s not clear whether their children’s fathers were other inmates or prison officials, but this detail was not important to legislators who, in 1848, passed a new law declaring that all children born in the penitentiary of African Americans serving life sentences would become property of the state. The women would raise the kids until the age of ten, at which point the penitentiary would place an ad in the newspaper. Thirty days later, they would be auctioned on the courthouse steps “cash on delivery.” The proceeds were used to fund schools for white children.

No recorded details remain about what it was like to raise a child in the prison or to have her taken away forever. We don’t know what became of the children or their mothers. The only prison documents left are sparse penitentiary logs showing the particulars of the sales. Sometimes the mother herself isn’t even noted. What was the mixture of the feeling of devastation over losing one’s child along with the twisted hope that life as a slave might be an improvement over life in a prison?”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“He is a US Army Rangers veteran and was once a small-town police chief. He says he retired when “the city council got afraid of me.” “When I was a cop, I knew damn well that I would shoot your ass. I didn’t carry two extra clips, I carried four. When I went to work, I went to war. When I got off, I still went to war. I carried two clips on me regardless of what I was wearing. I carried at least my Glock forty underneath my arm and usually I had a Glock forty-five on my ankle. Go ahead, play with me.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

“In 1884 the editor of the Daily Picayune wrote that it would be 'more humane to punish with death all prisoners sentenced to a longer period than six years,' because the average convict lived no longer than that. At the time, the death rate of six prisons in the Midwest, where convict leasing was nonexistent, was around 1 percent. By contrast, in the deadliest year of Louisiana's lease, nearly 20 percent of convicts perished. Between 1870 and 1901, some three thousand Louisiana convicts, most of whom were black, died under James's regime. Before the war, only a handful of planters owned more than one thousand slaves, and there is no record of anyone allowing three thousand valuable human chattel to die. The pattern was consistent throughout the South, where annual convict death rates ranged from about 16 percent to 25 percent, a mortality rate that would rival the Soviet gulags to come. Some American camps were far deadlier than Stalin's: In South Carolina the death rate of convicts leased to the Greenwood and Augusta Railroad averaged 45 percent a year from 1877 to 1879. In 1870 Alabama prison officials reported that more than 40 percent of their convicts had died in their mining camps. A doctor warned that Alabama's entire convict population could be wiped out within three years. But such warnings meant little to the men getting rich off of prisoners. There was simply no incentive for lessees to avoid working people to death. In 1883, eleven years before Samuel L. James's death, one Southern man told the National Conference of Charities and Correction: 'Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to take care of him: if he was sick get a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts: we don't own 'em. One dies, get another.”
― Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment