American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment

How did America’s conservative religious roots inform the way it viewed punishment? How has that mindset persisted today?

How did Southern states take advantage of the exception in the Thirteenth Amendment to restore their postwar economies? How did fear and racism enable the establishment of the modern penitentiary?

Explain the morally reductive thinking necessary for the kind of abuses Bauer documents to occur. What other historical examples illustrate this kind of thinking?

Society has justified the abuse of inmates for a very long time, from whipping prisoners who don’t pick enough cotton to allowing convict miners to be buried alive in coal mines. Is capitalism solely to blame? Are there distinctly human factors involved in tolerating these abuses?

The Stanford Prison Experiment has been debunked in many ways—students confessed they had been coached to act in certain ways, for example. Nevertheless, how does Bauer’s experience confirm the experiment’s basic hypothesis?

Plenty of social science research shows that treatment, education, and treating inmates with respect is a better long-term approach to crime reduction, and yet modern prisons still resemble cages for feral animals. What economic and psychological factors might explain this counterproductive approach?

How was the use of “convict guards” effective both as a disciplinary and economic measure? Why did the Supreme Court rule the practice inhumane?

What social and political conditions created the perfect opportunity for the formation of CCA and other private prison companies in the early 1980s?