Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Shane Bauer, author of American Prison: A reporter’s Undercover Journey Into The Business Of Punishment. Released just last month by Penguin.

Shane is a senior reporter at Mother Jones. His articles have appeared in The Nation, Salon, the LATs, SFC, and many other publications.

American Prison is a story about things we may not know, things we may not want to know and things that happen that we may find, after reading this book, that we do not wish to know. Nonetheless, this book is an important one, not solely because it exposes the soft white underbelly of for profit private prisons and their methods of amassing large sums of money. B passing profits on to its many corporate investors, and doing so by neglecting its charges and fortifying the bastions of slavery and involuntary servitude that have filled the coffers of many of our leaders, politicians and businessmen over generations.

The meticulous and even handed reporting contain in this book provide a shocking and severely eye-opening portrait of incarceration in the most heavily disproportionately weighted prison population in the world.