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

I picked up Shane Bauer's American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment at Book Expo last year, because, while it's not my primary research and advocacy focus, the prison system is a deep and important area of interest for me. It's intricately connected to education, and I can't help but care about the business of prison. 

Bauer is a journalist for Mother Jones magazine, and several years ago he decided to go undercover at a Louisiana prison to repent his experiences as a corrections officer there at a for-profit prison. His year-long experiment was quickly shortened — he lasted only a few months. However, it was enough to shape him and leaving him questioning everything he thought he knew about himself. 

He’s first hired over the phone, sight unseen. The for-profit prison system pays CO’s less than minimum wage, and they are hurting for employees. In fact, before finishing training, Bauer’s cohort is whittled down quite a bit. His whole training experience is enough to turn your stomach; beginning from the moment he walks in the door, not a single inmate at the Winn Correctional Center is seen as human. They are animals, and the COs’ jobs are to treat them as such. 

There is so much packed in this book, including a concise history of the for-profit prison industry, and it’s hard to know where to begin. The overall trajectory Bauer presents of himself — of a man seeking justice through journalism to a man who begins to see the inmates of Winn as the animals he is trained to view them as — was the most startling albeit the most predictable to anyone who has taken Psych 101. It’s the Stanford Prison Experiment writ large. It also feeds into a long-term research plan of mine related to education, but that’s neither here nor for this particular post. I wasn’t surprised at all at Bauer’s transformation, but wow, was it fast. Only a matter of months. It’s shocking how quickly the human brain will transform into full-scale survival mode. 

Winn, as many for-profit prisons, was facing a CO shortage. Who wants to do that job for less than most cities pay in minimum wage? And then, for those who do, who feels as though they are respected enough by their managers that they then respect the men they are tasked with supervising? It’s a recipe for disaster. My favorite parts of this book quickly became the footnotes, which usually invoked the mentioning of Winn’s denial that any events Bauer discusses aren’t true or that they have no record of them. It’s laughable, really. Anyone who has simply read an article online from anyone who has ever walked into a prison knows that Bauer’s experiences are the norm. 

I highly recommend this book for several reasons: Bauer’s persons journey, his interactions with the incarcerated men on his watch, the history of the for-profit prison system, and the final chapters in which Bauer shows the aftermath of his experiences and his reporting. It is well worth the time to ingest this book and sit with it for a time. 

Under the Knife: The History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations

Under the Knife: The History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations by Arnold Van de Laar showed up in a search for new books on Netgalley and the blurb grabbed me. 

In the history of medicine, surgery has not always been the hot ticket residency position we currently see in shows like Grey’s Anatomy or whatnot. In fact, it was considered a specialty that doctors ran from, and certain surgeries weren’t even classified as such in order to avoid correlating the knife with the huge risk of death. It wasn’t until, for example, cleanliness improved and a surgeon realized he could cut out his own bladder stone a different way and not bleed out that the diagnosis began releasing pain in so many afflicted. As sanitation increased tremendously and medicine improved, surgery has taken on a life of its own, and it has both saved and ended lives. This historical look at 28 operations that defined the field will change the way you see the process. 

This book is incredibly interesting, drawing on so much history both medical and not. It covers a range of historical figures and what happened to them — popes, European royalty, American politicians — and analyzes what happened, why, and how it could have been different if we knew then what we know now. This book can be incredibly detailed at times, and informative albeit clinical. I love the interweaving of historical figures and the surgeries that saved them, or just could have, and I took a good chunk of information away from this, including the technicality of death via gunshot. (Want to know what that is? Pick up the book!)

Elizabeth Warren: Her Fight. Her Work. Her Life.

Elizabeth Warren: Her Fight. Her Work. Her Life. by Anotonia Felix is a new biography out on Senator Elizabeth Warren, and this one focuses specifically on Sen. Warren’s work and how she came to be such a staunch consumer advocate. 

Elizabeth grew up in Oklahoma, the middle-class daughter of two parents who tried to give her and their three sons a “regular” life. That was until her father suffered health issues and her family went into financial dire straits. Her mother, who didn’t believe women should work unless it was necessary, went to Sears and took a job to keep her family above water. Elizabeth fought her tooth and nail to go to college. From there, to now, was a long road full of gusto, grit, and gumption. 

This biography was overall fantastic in that it provided me, the reader, with an intelligent yet accessible summary of Sen. Warren’s work in bankruptcy law. It’s a complicated subject, and one that is easy to tune out of when in books due to a lack of comprehension. I am one smart cookie, but I get bored when I can’t understand. The big advantage this book has is that Felix breaks down complicated legal concepts for the average reader. She does an incredible job — I now have a much stronger understanding of Sen. Warren’s work and why she is the advocate she is today. 

Elizabeth, always a bright and intelligent child, gave up on college early to marry her first husband. Reading this I wanted to scream into the book, “NOOOOO STOOOOOOPPPP.” We know how brilliant she is and where she is going, so it would all turn out fine, but it broke my feminist heart to watch her make this decision for the reasons she made it. It was important to me to read her story and understand how she became the lawyer and advocate that she is. 

One particular note of importance here is that Felix has done an incredible job of making Sen. Warren’s research and academic work on bankruptcy research accessible for the masses. It still wasn’t simple, but it was laid out clearly in layman’s terms so that we can understand the how and they why of the senator’s academic trajectory. It was so clear, in fact, that I’m going to keep this book to reference it when I need a jolt remembering Sen. Warren’s work and the reasoning behind it. 

Felix has painted an incredibly empathetic portrait of Sen. Warren, and I might have been easily swayed if I were less of a skeptic. I happen to be a fan of Sen. Warren as a woman, an academic, and a politician. I also would expect nothing less out of her biographer than praise. However, at times — most notably the final notes of the book — Felix is a little starry-eyed when writing about the senator. It’s not enough to be bothersome, but it is something that I noticed while wrapping up the book. 

I have already recommended this book three times and I just finished it. It’s well worth a read about the woman behind the watchdog.