Shane Bauer, a senior reporter for Mother Jones magazine, began his undercover stint as a prison guard at Winn Correctional Center in rural Louisiana to uncover the business of punishment.
“His survey of profit-driven incarceration begins in the mid-19th century and strikes a familiar theme, that mass incarceration in the South was simply slavery by another name. But Bauer adds new details, especially about the history of convict leasing, in which entire prisons — filled mostly with African-American inmates — were rented out to individuals or companies to provide a captive workforce.”