Thank you for the opportunities to read this book. I have attempted it on a number of occasions but unfortunately I haven’t been able to get into it.

This is a compelling read that explores just one of many problems with our criminal justice system. I had listened to a podcast about a journalist who worked for the well-known magazine who went and applied for a job at a private prison located in Louisiana. They hired him; he was deep undercover and what he reported was enough to make your skin crawl. They only wanted a body to fill out a uniform, he had no experience and minimal training.
While this book touched on more in-depth issues of this multi-billion dollar industry it still left me unsettled. The private sector boasts that it has a lower recidivism rate, that's false. They are all about making money; they are less likely to offer any educational or vocational benefits to the prisoners who are locked up. There is no reform as far as they're concerned it's all about the numbers. These prisons are being run like a huge corporation and they are adamant about keeping the cost down. I was stunned when I read how they operate. There are normally about two guards armed with a whistle and pepper spray per 200 prisoners that range from low-level street crimes to murderers. Plus they are told that under no circumstances are they to get in the middle of a prisoner on prisoner battle they are to blow their whistles, give me a break! It's easy for these low paid guards to get sucked into making extra cash to turn a blind eye while someone is getting sexually assaulted to supplying illegal contraband to high ranking prisoners on their block, these guards are barely making minimum wage as it is. So when they are approached by certain prisoners, I have no doubt that they have a foreboding sense of fear plus the monetary incentive is too great to resist.
These huge corporations come into low-income out of the way places with the promise of jobs and growth that will put these little two-bit towns back on the map. It doesn’t normally work as promised. There were instances where they would come in and build these huge facilities that literally set vacant for years! What a waste of taxpayers money! Our new administration is really going to pander to these corporate giants because of the new immigration laws, they already have several located in south Texas that are full.
This seems like a no-brainer to me, loosen up on drug laws, take a firm hand to prosecution and judicial misconduct and start using this massive amount of money to work with our youth before it’s too late.

DISCLOSURE: I received a copy of this e-galley through NetGalley, in exchange for my honest opinion. The above opinion I’ve expressed above are my own

I’d never call myself an expert in incarceration but because i follow closely the Prison Photography blog, The Intercept and watch the odd documentary, i’ve known for long that the USA has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world (right after Seychelles apparently.) 693 people out of 100,000 find themselves behind bars. That is nearly five times Britain’s and 15 times Japan’s rate. Because of mass incarceration, the U.S. government is contracting private corporations to house and monitor inmates that cannot find a bed in overcrowded public prisons.

I’ve always been very curious about an industry which financial well-being depends on keeping as many people behind bars as possible and for as long as possible. Lauren-Brooke Eisen‘s book sheds a compassionate, lucid and, she hopes, unprejudiced light onto the private prison industry. I wasn’t planning to review it but i learnt so much throughout the pages that i had to write something about the publication. I’ll start with a few facts and figures gleaned throughout the book:

– Private prisons “house 126,000 people in America, or 7% of state inmates and almost 18% of federal prisoners.” At the end of 2016 more than 40,000 undocumented immigrants were held in immigration detention facilities on any given day;

– between 1984 and 2005, a new prison opened every 8 and a half days;

– According to Adam Gopnik, more people are incarcerated America today than were imprisoned in Stalin’s gulags

– today Afro Americans are incarcerated at nearly 6 times the rate of whites Americans,

– 1 out of 9 state workers is employed in prison and today the country employs more correction officers than pediatricians, judges, court reporters and firefighters combined. Many states spend more in incarceration than they do on education;

– today, the for-profit industry manages 8% of prison beds across country but 62% immigration detention beds;

– 1 in every 28 children has a parent behind bars so children programme Sesame Street recently introduced a new character whose dad is imprisoned:


Alex, Sesame Street’s first-ever muppet with a parent in prison

The first chapters of Inside Private Prisons set the stage by looking at the history of prison in the U.S.A., the rise of the privatization of government services since the early 1800s, the long history of using captive labor for economic purposes, etc. The author then turns her attention to the many forms that the privatisation of the correction sector can adopt: from cigarettes especially designed for use in prison to technology that protects against civilian drones, from correctional trade shows to super lucrative prison telecommunication to enable families to converse over long distances.


JP4, the first tablet designed specifically for prisoners. Photo: Motherboard

A large section of the book also details how private-prison firms are attempting to ‘diversify’ and respond to the recent drive in being “smart on crime” rather than being “though on crime.” Criminal justice reformers are indeed looking for ways to safely reduce prison populations by investing in alternatives, by reforming sentencing laws, by reducing revocations to prison for violating probation or parole, etc. Policy makers have realized that more incarceration didn’t automatically translate into large crime-reduction benefits for the country and that the high rates of recidivism didn’t came about because of an increase in crime or because American citizens are inherently more prone to offend than others but because of policy choices adopted in previous decades.

The private sector is thus looking into ways to get involved into these alternatives to imprisonment and to make a profit out of the endeavours: they build halfway houses, drug or mental health treatment facilities, intermediate sanctions facilities, develop electronic-monitoring services and get involved more closely (and lucratively) into job training and other community-based operations that include rehabilitation. Carl Takei calls this trend ’the Wal-Martification of reentry.” The financial incentive in each of these operations is to keep people trapped in system for as long as possible.

Worryingly, it seems that nowadays, the biggest cash cow for the private prison industry is illegal immigration. Providing beds for immigrant detainees makes a lot of (financial) sense: these people have limited legal rights and are not guaranteed education programs, job training nor mental health and drug abuse counseling. They cost less and complain less.

Unsurprisingly, the election of Trump is a blessing for the whole industry: the new president favours rampant privatization and though on crime policies. And although he is notoriously ‘not racist‘, Trump is very keen on expanding the US immigrant detention infrastructure.

Throughout the book, people interviewed by the author conclude that even though private prisons have existed in US for almost 4 decades, there is still little evidence that they are cost saving and that they provide any substantial benefits for society. They also lack transparency and accountability. In the last chapter of the book, Eisen suggests 10 concrete requirements that would set the ground for a more robust state and federal government contracts with the private industry. But ultimately, she notes, the discussions around private prisons are a diversion from the real discussion about incarceration and punishment. I’ll end with a quote from her book:

The distinction between private and public prisons is not as important as the distinction between warehousing criminals and rehabilitating them.

Very in-depth study on the prison system. At times, it seemed to in-depth. I enjoyed the interaction with the interaction the author provided, but it was a lot of information to digest. It is presented well I did learn a lot and I felt the author gave one enough information to form their own opinion on private prisons: Good or Bad? Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review.

First and foremost, Inside Private Prisons is an investigation of the benefits and downsides of privatizing the American prison system. But of course, everything is more complicated than it seems. A journey through the history of privatization goes on to explore our sordid past (and present) of prisoners as commodities, how activists use prison divestment as a tool, and the extent to which immigrant detention centers fit into the prison industrial complex. Overarching the span of the book, readers are encouraged to reflect on the nature of the carceral state: how did we get to this age of mass incarceration? How will our current political landscape shape the future?

3.5 out of 5 stars: This book was well-researched almost to a fault - just bursting at the seams with information. The overarching structure of the book sets a solid foundation for discussion, but I felt within each chapter the narrative tends to diverge wildly, leaving some anecdotes and facts a bit scattered and out of place. On the one hand, I want to casually recommend this to anyone with zero background knowledge of the United States prison system (like me!) because it such a strong collection of data and eye-opening realities. But if I'm completely honest it was a bit of a struggle for me to get through, probably better suited as a required reading text in a college course.

An exhaustingly thorough look at the private prison industry. It’s amazing to me how fast the system has grown since my retirement from the Federal Bureau of Prisons only seven years ago. While I am all for private industry, the amount of outright corrupt behavior is depressing!

3.5 stars. Eisen has done a tremendous amount of research into the whole American penal corrections system. She is incredibly even-handed in her approach which is rare when authors are tackling such a controversial topic. It would be easy for this to become a preacher for her cause but she sees both sides and presents them well.

There is a lot of data in here, but for the most part it is interestingly presented. I most enjoyed the investigative reporting - as she visits these places and meets those involved first-hand, especially in the private prisons and immigration detention centres. Private prisons seem like a self-serving cycle that is deeply damaging American society, and in particular minorities who are incarcerated at a deeply disturbing rate.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC in return for an honest review.

I have always been fascinated by prisons, cycles of incarceration, and how the prison system works and this book was super fascinating to me. I learned a lot about private prisons and how they affect politics, prisoners, and every facet of society. While there were a lot of facts and data in this book they were explained well and told in such a way that it wasn't boring to read. I learned a lot through reading this book and thought a lot about what I was reading.

This book looks at an especially problematic aspect of the capitalist system in the United States which is the privatization of prisons. Eisen gives a very in-depth analysis of how cooperations are profiting off of the racist and classist incarceration of the American people. The book is very dry and the current version of the ebook is difficult to read due to the lack of capitalization but once you get past that this is a very solid piece of work.

This book detailing the private prison system is extremely well written. It's a great resource for anyone wanting to know more about this. Serious reading and nit in the slightest bit sensationalised.