Shane Bauer Went Undercover as a Prison Guard

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Let’s turn now to another less palatable aspects of the American legal system as we delve into the harsh reality of its prison system. After being released from Iran’s notorious Evin jail, going undercover as a prison guard in Louisiana might seem a strange choice, but not for Investigative Reporter Shane Bauer. In his new book, American Prison, Bauer details the brutality of life behind bars. Despite being tortured by the Iranian regime and spending months in solitary confinement, Bauer was left conflicted by his experiences as he told our Michel Martin.

MICHEL MARTIN: Shane Bauer, welcome. Thank you so much for talking with us.

SHANE BAUER, AUTHOR, “AMERICAN PRISON”: Thanks for having me in.

MARTIN: You’re actually known for your international reporting. And I think people will remember, many people who follow these things will remember that you were actually arrested after a hiking trip in Iran. You spent two years in one of the most notorious prisons in Iran. So what made you want to investigate American prisons after an experience like that?

BAUER: I didn’t really intend to when I got out. I thought I would go back to the Middle East where I was working as a reporter. But I came home, was kind of readjusting. When I was ready to kind of get back to my work, I started investigating our use of long-term solitary confinement. Having been in solitary myself in Iran, having been on hunger strike, it was something that I was kind of naturally drawn towards. And I learned that we had have about 80,000 people in solitary confinement in this country given — a given day and thousands of people who’ve been in for more than 10 years. So after kind of doing that reporting, I just — I kept getting pulled kind of deeper and deeper into our prison system. We have the largest prison system in the world, about five percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. And in that reporting was kind of constantly coming up against walls. It’s very difficult to get access to prisons in America. And as a journalist, if you get in, you typically — you look at a kind of a scripted tour, guided tour. You usually can’t even request specific inmates to interview so they will provide you with somebody. So it’s a frustrating process.

MARTIN: So what happened? You just pick your head up one day and said, I’ll just get a job as a prison guard?

BAUER: I just filled out an application on the corporate website. I didn’t lie in my application. I put my current job which was for “Mother Jones Magazine”. And within a couple of weeks, I was getting calls and requests for job interviews. I had decided along with my editors that the ground rule would be that I would never lie in doing this project. So before I did these interviews, I just couldn’t imagine it working. If they say like why do you want to —

MARTIN: Why do you want to work in a prison? So —

BAUER: — work in prison or something but they didn’t.

MARTIN: They never asked you why?

BAUER: No. And they didn’t ask me my job history. They just asked me some kind of boilerplate questions about how I work with others, what I do if a boss tells me to do something I don’t want to do. They were desperate for employees. The job that I eventually took in Louisiana paid $9.00 an hour.

MARTIN: What made you take that job?

BAUER: Ultimately, I chose Louisiana partially because it had the highest rate of incarceration, not only in the country but in the entire world. Winn Correctional, the prison I worked at, was the oldest medium-security private prison in the country. So that seemed interesting to me but it was a fairly random decision.

MARTIN: So just tell me about like what was your first day?

BAUER: I’m really nervous. I’m kind of imagining all these scenarios. I’m worried that they’ve already found out that I’m a reporter. And I go in for training and I meet the other cadets. Some of them were just at high school, 18-years-old, 19-years-old. There was a single mom who was there because she wanted health insurance for her kids. It was a kind of a hardscrabble group and —

MARTIN: Were they all white?

BAUER: No, they weren’t. It was a mix of white and black guards. And actually, the majority of guards were black and the majority were women also.

MARTIN: The majority were women?

BAUER: Yes.

MARTIN: Interesting.

BAUER: Yes.

MARTIN: One of the things about your book that struck me is that for a lot of people reading it, it’s absolutely shocking.

BAUER: Yes.

MARTIN: But for a lot of people, it isn’t.

BAUER: Yes.

MARTIN: And I just wonder when it sort of occurred to you or whether it struck you that you were really in a different world.

BAUER: Immediately. Yes. I mean my second day of training, I remember the instructor asked the class, “What would you do if we saw two inmates fighting?” And one cadet said we’d break it up, someone said to call back up. And he said, do not get in the middle of a fight. He said your job is to shout at them stop fighting. And he said we’re not going to pay you enough to get in the middle of it. And if those fools want to cut each other up, then happy cutting.

MARTIN: How did you understand that instruction?

BAUER: Yes.

MARTIN: It’s just that simple which is we’re not paying you and if you get hurt —

BAUER: Yes. I mean I think

MARTIN: — too bad?

BAUER: — the instructors had actually said to us that part of our job is to deliver value to our shareholders. If we get hurt, cost company money and —

MARTIN: They said that to you?

BAUER: They said that we — our job is to deliver value to our shareholders, yes. We had to do things that like telling people stop fighting. Kind of like in court, it shows that we’re doing our job, we’re instructing them to stop.

MARTIN: You’ve made a point several times of highlighting the fact that this is the private prison system, right? Could you just talk about why that distinction is so important?

BAUER: Yes.

MARTIN: What point you’re trying to make with that.

BAUER: The private prisons represent about eight percent of our country’s prisoners. They are run by corporations, corporations that are traded on New York Stock Exchange. These companies run prisons generally for states because they save money. So they run their prisons cheaper than the states do. They’re trying to turn a profit so they’re cutting corners wherever they can. And I saw a lot of this. One of the main ways they save money actually is through staffing. That’s the main cost of running a prison so they pay staff less, they hire less staff. At the prison I was in, there were about 1,500 inmates and about 25 guards on duty on a given day. They also were clearly cutting corners on medical care. I met a man who had lost his legs and fingers to gangrene who had been going for months at the infirmary asking, telling them that his legs hurt, they need help, and they would give him a couple of Motrin and send him back.

MARTIN: Wait, wait. He lost his fingers and his legs while he was in prison?

BAUER: Yes. So —

MARTIN: Because they did not treat him?

BAUER: Yes, the issue comes down to the fact that the company by their contract, if they send a prisoner to hospital, they have to pay. So there’s a lot of reluctance to do that when they’re making — the state’s paying them $34.00 a day for each inmate where a hospital trip will cost thousands.

MARTIN: Wait, wait. They’re paid — wait. The state pays $34.00 a day per prisoner.

BAUER: Yes.

MARTIN: So that has to cover food and personnel and medical care —

BAUER: And profit.

MARTIN: — sheets laundry.

BAUER: On top of that, yes.

MARTIN: Do you think that the prisoners understood that they were there for the prison to make a profit?

BAUER: Oh, absolutely.

MARTIN: Really?

BAUER: They’re talking about it all the time. The prisoners would say to guards like you’re not making enough money, this company is exploiting you, they’re just trying to make a profit. And I would see guards and prisoners kind of bonding over their shared disdain for the company.

MARTIN: The thing about your book that you describe is that just how kind of demeaning it is —

BAUER: Yes.

MARTIN: — but for both parties.

BAUER: Yes. Being a guard, I really saw how much they are kind of caught up in the system and exploited in a lot of ways. I mean they’re generally poor people from a poor town. They feel they have no other options so they take a $9.00 an hour job. They work 12 hours a day.

MARTIN: Everybody works 12 hours a day, that’s not —

BAUER: Minimum.

MARTIN: — an emergency?

BAUER: Minimum.

MARTIN: Twelve hours a day minimum?

BAUER: Yes.

MARTIN: Can I read a passage from the book here? You said that research shows that on average, about one-third of prison guards suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, more than soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. And you write according to one study, corrections officers on average commit suicide at two-and-a-half times more than the population at large. And you said that they also have shorter life spans. Why? Why is it —

BAUER: Yes. I mean it’s just an incredibly stressful job. And there are so few people working so you literally can’t do all the things that you’re meant to do. We’re supposed to check prisoners as they enter the unit. For example, make sure that nobody has weapons. And when you’re two guards and you have 350 prisoners and you have to unlock the doors, put them inside, it’s absolutely impossible. You literally cannot do that.

MARTIN: You obviously have personal courage and you obviously have fortitude but I do find myself wondering like how you survived it.

BAUER: Yes, yes. I changed a lot inside the prison. And when I first went in, I thought I’ll just be like an easygoing guard, kind of just hang back and it will be fine but it’s not — it’s never like that. You have to — in prison, anyone in prison, whether you’re a prisoner or a guard, you learn very quickly that you have to kind of set lines, you have to hold those lines, and you can’t ever let people kind of push your boundaries.

MARTIN: You said at one point, you became much more authoritarian than you ever expected you would be. Can you just give an example of that?

BAUER: When prisoners come back from chow, for example, when they’re eating, we have to put them back in the dorms. There’s always some that kind of running around and just kind of they’re hard to chase them to the dorms. There was one guy that was like that and I kind of had trouble with. And I just start ordering him, go to your tier, and he’s kind of yelling at me. And then we’re kind of like have a little tension and I put him in, I slam the door. And I turn around and leave and I hear him saying something like you’re going to end up dead and so I kind of paused and thought for a second like what am I supposed to do when something like this happens. I called into my radio for a supervisor. Somebody came down and I just told him like I want this guy sent to the segregation unit, essentially solitary confinement.

MARTIN: You sent somebody to solitary?

BAUER: Yes. And —

MARTIN: Wait, wait, wait. The guy who was in that —

BAUER: Yes.

MARTIN: — solitary for two years, you sent somebody?

BAUER: Yes, exactly. So when I’m in that moment, I’m kind of thinking of like how do I deal with these people who are kind of challenging my authority basically. And that is really the only means we had, it was to send them away. And there is this kind of voice in my head that was like afterwards it was like I didn’t see him say that, was I sure that this is the person that said those words and — but the other voice was like I need to set an example and it doesn’t really matter. I need to show all these people who see this happening that I’m willing to do that.

MARTIN: One of the really hard things about the book is your description of the fact that so many people have a serious mental illness —

BAUER: Yes.

MARTIN: — that wasn’t being treated.

BAUER: Yes.

MARTIN: And that they knew they needed help and they didn’t get it.

BAUER: My first day on the job, I was stationed on suicide watch. It’s common for new guards to be put there. It is kind of the worst job in the prison. You essentially sit in front of a cell where an inmate is in solitary confinement and you watch him for 12 hours. Every 15 minutes, you make a note what he’s doing. Usually, the prisoner does not want you sitting in front of a cell so there’s kind of this just ongoing dynamic that is tense and it’s just not nice. And so I’m sitting in front of this cell, cell of an inmate named Damien Costly. He’s on suicide watch which means that he is not allowed to have clothes.

MARTIN: He has no clothes?

BAUER: Right. He has one blanket, a tear-proof blanket. It’s all that’s allowed in a cell. No reading material. His food is worse than the rest of the prison. It’s — the caloric value of the food that he gets is below USDA standards. And they actually told us in training that part of the reason that they keep the conditions that way is to discourage people from going on suicide watch, from saying that they’re suicidal so they get sent there because it cost a lot more money because the guard to prisoner ratio is one to one there, rather than one to 175. So Damien told me like, “Get away from the front of my cell.” He threatened to jump off his top bunk and break his neck so — which I’m required to report so I reported it. Six hours later, a psychiatrist comes and talks to him. There is, by the way, for the whole prison of 1,500 inmates, one part-time psychiatrist. And a third of the inmate population has mental health issues. Months later after I leave the prison, I am contacted by a lawyer who represented Damien’s mom, she had found out that I was a reporter who was working at the prison. And she said that he’d committed suicide. I learned later — I went and visited her and she gave me access to a lot of his documents that he had been on suicide many — suicide watch many times. He had been in hunger strike many times to demand mental health care. He had been on a wait list for two years for a mental health group. And it was clear that he was wracked with guilt for his crime. He had killed a man. Other prisoners said that he would talk to him about it and say that he was suicidal. And he eventually hanged himself. And when he died, he weighed 71 pounds.

MARTIN: The name of the institution you were in was Winn?

BAUER: Yes, Winn Correctional Center.

MARTIN: Have they reacted as an institution? How did they respond to the book?

BAUER: It comes out in the local media that I was a reporter working there. And the company then contacted Mother Jones and they threatened to sue if we published a story. Ultimately, our lawyers said they had no legal standing. I didn’t lie. I did my job they actually offered me a promotion while I was there.

MARTIN: They offered you a promotion while you were there?

BAUER: Yes.

MARTIN: There are those who will hear our conversation and say why do I care, it’s too bad. But if you break the law, this is the consequence, why should I care. What do you say to that?

BAUER: I mean if your kid gets to a fight at school, do you want to lock him in a closet for two weeks just because he broke the rules? I mean I think we need to ask ourselves what kind of society we live in. And even if you don’t care about these people, these people — most of these people get out, they’re back in our communities. And being essentially warehoused for years or decades is not rehabilitating anybody.

MARTIN: Every society has people that, for whatever reason, they feel a need to punish through separating from everyone else, but what you describe, it’s barbaric.

BAUER: Yes.

MARTIN: OK. But the question is why? Why do you think it’s like that?

BAUER: I think there’s a lot of ways to answer that question. I mean, in this prison, in particular, there’s a profit motive that plays a lot into it.

MARTIN: Do you think that a public prison is better?

BAUER: There are certain issues that occur in private prisons that are worse than public prisons, like the lack of security and even worse medical care. But the public prisons in this country are also abysmal. I mean it’s not in any way — I would never say that state of current public prison is the goal of humane prison, it’s not. A lot of the same issues occur there. The suicide watch, for example, all prisons have this.

MARTIN: The extended use of solitary confinement is something —

BAUER: Exactly.

MARTIN: — that has gotten quite a lot of attention.

BAUER: Yes. And most of the long-term solitary confinement is in public prisons, not in private prisons.

MARTIN: Do you have a theory of everything, of like why imprisonment in this country is the way it is?

BAUER: Well, I think part of it is the fact that we have so many people in prison. It’s just an astronomical amount of people. There are 2.3 million people behind bars and that costs so much money. There’s no way to hold that many people in a way that is humane that is not going to just bankrupt the states. That is kind of the core of the problem. And then we have set back from there and ask why we have so many people in prison and —

MARTIN: I am going to ask that question. Do you have a theory of that?

BAUER: I mean I think there are many factors. We live in a racist society that’s been proven in many ways that policing targets — police target people of color. The justice system imprisons people of color longer than white people. There are also issues that are — the length of sentencing has increased a lot over time. We put people away for longer and longer. Mandatory minimum sentencing is a huge issue. We’re locking people up for so long and they’re not getting out.

MARTIN: You have an interesting analysis in the book where you actually make the connection to slavery.

BAUER: Yes.

MARTIN: So what do you mean?

BAUER: Our prison system in the south especially grew out of slavery in a lot of ways. I mean when slavery ended, the southern prison systems were all privatized and prisoners were leased to businessmen and planters to work on cotton plantations, to work in coal mines, to build railroad tracks. And they were like — enslaved people had been, driven by torture to meet quotas, they’re whipped. And the death rate actually after slavery of convicts in the south was much higher than it was for slaves. Throughout the south, it was between 16 and 25 percent of convicts who die every year. And this went on for decades. And even when that system ended, the states, when they stopped leasing prisoners to these companies, they bought plantations themselves and worked prisoners on plantations, continued to whip prisoners. Arkansas until 1967 was allowing whipping. And what I learned in my research was actually the founder of the Corrections Corporation of America started his career running a cotton plantation prison in Texas. This was the size of Manhattan, where prisoners were working in cotton fields, having to meet quotas. He’s living in a plantation house. He’s served by prisoners which they called house boys. So he’s living a life that is very reminiscent of the life that slave owners were living 100 years earlier. This man in particular was — he was — these prisons at the time in the ’60s and ’70s were public prisons, they weren’t private. But he was running them at a profit, putting money into state coffers. He was really the last person to do that. And when he stopped working in these prison plantations, it happened to coincide with a huge boom in the American prison population, which really changed the system a lot, made it so that states were scrambling to build prisons fast enough. And a couple of businessmen approached him. He was known for running prisons at a profit and they proposed a new model, especially to make money rather than using prisoners as labor, the prisoners themselves are essentially the commodity and the states are paying htem just to house them and traded on the stock exchange.

MARTIN: Well, Shane, thanks for talking to us.

BAUER: Thank you.