Have you ever had a riot? I ask a recruiter from the Corrections Corporation of America.

Have you ever had a riot? I ask a recruiter from the Corrections Corporation of America.

T he last riot we had was two years ago, he says over the phone.

Yeah, but that was with the Puerto Ricans! a woman’s voice cuts in. She hasn’t spoken until this moment. We got rid of them. Now we just have people from Oklahoma.

He reads me questions. There are times that people disagree. When was the last time you disagreed with someone? How did you work it out? A supervisor wants to send you to a seminar on a topic you aren’t interested in. How do you react? He isn’t interested in the details of my resume. He doesn’t ask about my job history, my current employment with the Foundation for National Progress, publisher of Mother Jones magazine, or why someone who writes about criminal justice in California would want to move across the country to work in a prison. It’s all in my application: My real name, my personal information, the fact that I was arrested for shoplifting when I was nineteen. Did he Google me? A quick search would have brought up my prison reporting and articles about the two years I spent as a prisoner in Iran. He doesn’t ask about many of the things I feared he would, so I don’t bring them up.

I am tempted to ask him about the results of the survey I took on CCA’s website, testing my instincts about working in a prison. It provided various scenarios, and I was to choose from multiple choices how I would be most likely to respond: “An inmate receives a food tray and eats all the food except the dessert (pudding). The inmate then walks to the food line and asks for a new tray of food because there is hair in the pudding.” Would I replace the whole tray, the dessert only, or ignore him? “An inmate tells you that she thinks you don’t like her because of her race.” Do I tell her she’s wrong? Ignore her? Tell her that, in fact, she is the one who is racist?

Then there was the section in which, next to dozens of statements, I clicked buttons ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”:

On that last one I clicked “strongly agree,” though after I submitted my application to a handful of CCA prisons around the country, I worried that my answer might have made them less likely to hire me.

The man on the phone tells me I would go through four weeks of training. Then I would be expected to work twelve hours a day and sometimes sixteen.

When can you start? he asks.

I tell him I need to think it over.

I take a breath. Am I really going to become a prison guard? Now that it might actually happen, it feels scary and a bit extreme.

I began applying for jobs in private prisons because I wanted to see the inner workings of an industry that holds some 130,000 of our nation’s 1.5 million prisoners. * As a journalist, it’s nearly impossible to get an unconstrained look inside our penal system. When prisons do let reporters in, it’s usually for carefully managed tours and monitored interviews with inmates. Many states don’t allow reporters to choose who they want to interview; the prison administration chooses for them. Phone calls are surveilled and letters are opened and read by guards. Inmates who talk freely to a reporter risk retaliation, including solitary confinement. Private prisons are especially secretive. Their records often aren’t subject to public access laws; CCA has fought to defeat legislation that would make private prisons subject to the same disclosure rules as its public counterparts. And even if I could get uncensored information from private prison inmates, how would I verify their claims? I keep coming back to this question: Is there any other way to see what really happens inside a private prison?

But now that this is becoming real, there is a competing question: Am I really going back to prison? It has only been three years since my own incarceration ended. In 2009 I was working as a freelance reporter in the Middle East, living in Damascus with my partner, Sarah Shourd. When our friend Josh Fattal came to visit, we took a trip to Iraqi Kurdistan, which at that time had a growing tourist industry and was considered safe for Western visitors. During a long hike near a local tourist site, we unknowingly neared the Iranian border. The three of us were arrested and driven across the country to Iran’s Evin prison, where we would be interrogated for months while being kept in solitary confinement. Josh and I would be celled together after four months, but Sarah would spend more than a year in isolation before being released in 2010. Josh and I would get out after twenty-six months inside.

As I swam in the warm phosphorescent waters of the Gulf of Oman the night of my release, I did not imagine that I would ever look at a prison again. My homecoming was disorienting. 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. I found myself overreacting to people who had any amount of authority, as though they were guards. I felt angry at everything.

American prisons helped me to anchor myself. During my early days of freedom, I heard about a hunger strike taking place throughout prisons in California, where I lived. Inmates were protesting the use of long-term solitary confinement: Nearly four thousand prisoners were serving indeterminate sentences in “the hole.” 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.

As I was coming to terms with what I’d been through during my own two years of captivity, struggling to readjust and overcome post-traumatic stress disorder, I began to correspond with some of the men in solitary located here in the United States. I found that some were vigilant about keeping their minds sharp; others were broken, their letters indecipherable. I began to read through their prison records and learned that many who had been in the hole for years had not committed violent offenses in prison. Some were indeed dangerous gang members, while others were put in solitary because of people they hung out with, for their work as jailhouse lawyers, or because they possessed books on African American history. Seven months after my release from prison, I visited Pelican Bay prison, one of the first institutions built for long-term solitary confinement. There I saw men in eleven-by-seven-foot cells with no windows. I met one man who went twelve years without ever seeing a tree. The four months I’d spent in solitary confinement in Iran was an eternity I will never erase from my psyche, but the abyss of isolation these prisoners lived in helped me to put my own struggle into perspective.

I still intended to go back to the Middle East. I spoke Arabic, and the Arab Spring was devolving into war. But I was never able to turn away from the American prison system; quite the opposite. We are living through a time of mass incarceration with few parallels in world history. 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. When we look back in a century, I am convinced that our prison system will be one of the main factors that define the current era.

This book focuses on one private prison during a four-month period. It also examines how the profit motive has shaped America’s prison system for the last 250 years. Private prisons do not drive mass incarceration today; they merely profit from it. Who will end up in prison is not determined by the prisons but by police, prosecutors, and judges. The reasons for our overinflated prison system are complex and highly debated, but few scholars deny that racism has been a major factor. For much of America’s history, racism, captivity, and profit were intertwined. Slavery, the root of antiblack racism in America, was a for-profit venture. When slavery ended, powerful interests immediately devised a way to continue profiting from the captive bodies of African Americans and other poor people. My research took me inside a private prison, but it also took me to history books, old newspapers, forgotten memoirs, and penitentiary reports stuffed away in state archives. Through the course of my digging, it has become clear that there has never been a time in American history in which companies or governments weren’t trying to make money from other people’s captivity. I have attempted to weave this larger history into the story of my eyewitness reporting, in the hope that I can adequately convey the scope and stakes of what is surely a national disaster.

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Within two weeks of filling out its online application, I get callbacks from Corrections Corporation of America’s prisons in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Colorado, and an immigrant detention center in Arizona. When I call Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana, the lady who answers is chipper and has a smoky southern voice.

I should tell you up front that the job only pays nine dollars an hour, but the prison is in the middle of a national forest. Do you like to hunt and fish?

I like fishing.

Well there is plenty of fishing and people around here like to hunt squirrels. You ever squirrel hunt?

No.

Well I think you’ll like Louisiana. I know it’s not a lot of money but they say you can go from a CO [corrections officer] to a warden in just seven years! The CEO of the company started out as a CO.

When I do an official interview a few days later, they ask me a lot of the same boilerplate questions as the other prisons, and then: “What is your idea of customer service? How does this term relate to providing services to inmates?” I fumble through a nonanswer about the customer always being right, but maybe not in a prison? Well, we’re both looking at each other, and I can tell you right now we think you’d be a good fit, the recruiter says. So long as I pass the background check, she tells me, I’m hired.

My editors at Mother Jones and I talk through hypotheticals. What would I do if my cover was blown? We work out bureaucratic details like making sure I have workers’ comp to cover things like getting stabbed on the job. Our lawyers study Louisiana law to make sure I’m not doing anything illegal. My editors leave the assignment open-ended and tell me that if I want to end the project at any point, for any reason, I should do so without hesitation. I will use my real name. I don’t need to divulge everything about myself, but I will never lie. If someone asks if I am a journalist, I will say yes.

We deliberate over the legal and ethical issues. For some, undercover journalism is taboo; many newsrooms require that reporters disclose themselves as such under all circumstances. But my project fit the Poynter guidelines for undercover reporting perfectly: The subject was of vital public interest; there were no other means to get the story; I would disclose, in my writing, the nature and reason of any deception; the news organization would not skimp on the funding and time needed to fully pursue the story; and the potential harm prevented by the reporting outweighed the potential harm caused.

Unless otherwise noted, I have changed the names of the people I met at Winn to protect their identities. I was careful to use people’s words verbatim as much as possible. Throughout this book, everything between quotation marks was captured by a recording device or copied from documents. Dialogue in italics is based on my notes of those moments when I couldn’t use my equipment. In some instances dialogue was rearranged slightly for smoother flow.

Undercover reporting has only fairly recently become such a sensitive topic. Our country has a rich history of it. In 1859 Northern reporters posed as slave buyers attending a Georgia auction, because it was the only way they could get near it. Their reporting was rich in details unknown to most Northerners: the examinations of humans like they were livestock, the twisted pride a slave would sometimes take in demanding a high price, and the unimaginable heartbreak of children being torn from their mothers. In 1887 Nellie Bly famously feigned insanity to get herself involuntarily committed to a women’s insane asylum for ten days, an experience she chronicled for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Her reporting led New York to increase the budget of the Department of Public Charities and change regulations to better ensure that only the seriously mentally ill were committed. In 1892 San Francisco Examiner reporter W. H. Brommage took a job as a sailor to investigate the practice of blackbirding, in which ship captains tricked Pacific Islanders into contracts of indentured servitude on sugarcane plantations in Guatemala. In 1959 John Howard Griffin took a medication that darkened his skin and traveled for six weeks in the Deep South to investigate segregation. In 1977 the Chicago Sun-Times bought a bar, staffed it with reporters, and installed hidden cameras to investigate corrupt city inspectors who were willing to overlook anything for twenty bucks. Barbara Ehrenreich took low-wage jobs as a waitress, a Walmart clerk, and a cleaning woman to bring attention to the struggles of the working poor. And Ted Conover, whose book was one of the inspirations for my project, worked for a year as a prison guard in New York’s Sing Sing prison in the late 1990s.

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