“Thompson was not the only official who looked to private prisons to save his city. During that time, private prisons were popping up across the nation, with a number of facilities going up in small towns. For my forthcoming book, Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration, I spent time in these rural towns—in the Midwest and along the southern border—exploring the relationship between private prison corporations and small communities.”