1) "The Celling of America," edited by Daniel Burton-Rose, Dan Pens and Paul Wright

Book review by The Nation

April 20, 1998

The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry

By Christian Parenti

Prison is like a foreign country: It's far away, self-contained, operates by its I own rules and is largely ignored by the mainstream U.S. news media. True, occasionally someone writes an excellent investigative expose, but even activists are hampered by a dearth of reliable information about what really goes on in "the big house." Among the crime-spooked general population, misconception and indifference are the norm. Most of what we know about prison comes from the flat and flimsy press releases of mendacious prison officials, via lazy and ill-informed. But there is plenty of news in prison, and some fine journalists there as well. Now with the release of The Celling of America, we can sample some of their reporting.

Edited by Daniel Burton-Rose, Dan Pens and Paul Wright (Pens and Wright did much of the writing; both are serving long terms in the Washington State Reformatory for violent crimes), The Celling of America is indispensable reading for all those who wish to understand the great American lockup. Mostly written for and by prisoners, Celling covers a lot of ground, from conditions on death row, to official corruption in private prisons, to the real deal behind a wave of federal prison riots in 1995. It also serves as an introduction to Prison Legal News, the monthly magazine for and by prisoners that is to prison watchers what The Financial Times is to capitalists.

Though closely followed by many prisoners, select lawyers, investigative journalists and even a few judges, Prison Legal News can be hard to appreciate. Typically an issue of P.L.N. has the look of an industry newsletter, deliberately wrapped in a cover of turgid legal articles and larded with arcane-looking case citations. While some jailhouse lawyers, with restricted access to law libraries, depend on P.L.N.'s legal reporting, most prisoners and other readers find such articles hopelessly technical. But far from poor marketing, the legal covers are a subtle strategy for eluding prison censors. The editors reason that, if it looks boring, apolitical and legalistic, prison guards who routinely ban muckraking, antiprison and left-wing publications won't read and pulp P.L.N. It's a specific application of a general survival strategy that some prisoners call the "lazy pig theory."

But The Celling of America focuses on P.L.N.'s investigative pieces, like its account of Microsoft's use of convict labor. How can prisoners, with only their ballpoint pens, stamps and sparse pay phones, scoop the big boys? In part it's because of the mainstream media's lack of interest in prisons, and partly it's the result of prisoner tenacity and far-flung cooperation. In the eight years P.L.N. has been publishing, the editors have built a sprawling network of journalists in public and private prisons around the nation. These unlikely reporters clip local papers, record firsthand testimony, copy discovery from obscure criminal and civil rights cases and send it all -- by way of third parties and the U.S. Postal Service -- to the cells of Dan Pens and Paul Wright.

From this farrago of horror, fact and occasional fantasy, Pens and Wright have molded the country's most impeccably professional source of prison news. The best parts of the book are those surreal and brutal insights that can come only from prisoners themselves. For example, Adrian Lomax's "Prison TV: Luxury or Management Tool?" sketches a terrifying picture of the Box as psychic meat grinder. Politicians may rail against TV but prison administrators mince no words in asserting that they "need" television -- in the big house, television is the superdoping device. "Prisoners who spend most of their waking hours staring at the tube, as an embarrassingly large number do, pose no threat to the keep... It's no coincidence that TV privileges have grown during the same period when everything else has been cut back. Prison officials gave us more TV precisely for the purpose of keeping prisoners pacified while the DOC took everything else."

When the dubious privilege of TV is removed -- through punishment time in solitary confinement -- an older, more radical prison culture re-emerges. Prisoners of different races and rival gangs will listen in rapt attention as someone in solitary reads aloud. "Reading material is like gold in the seg units. All books and magazines that make it into the hole are eagerly devoured and passed from prisoner to prisoner. I've seen convicts perform astonishing feats of fishing, skipping lines from tier to tier and even around comers in order to retrieve printed matter."

Often political-prisoner writing can be somewhat hyperbolic. But Celling keeps the rage and horror of prison on a tight and precise leash, as when Ray Luc Levasseur reports from the quiet concrete hell of a federal control unit. "There is no Imam for Muslim prisoners. Every morning, I go through my own ablution. Every morning there is a layer of chalky dust settled about the cell. It comes through the single air vent. It never stops. Each morning I busy myself with a wet rag mopping up all [the dust] that is not in my lungs."

To say that the bad news is sketched with detail, not bluster, doesn't mean Celling sanitizes prison. Essays like "Prison Legal News' Top Ten Non-Frivolous Prisoner Lawsuits" are almost too searing to finish. Cases include: open pit toilets and cells that routinely flood with sewage in Massachusetts; massive overcrowding in Harris County, Texas, where scores of prisoners sleep on the floor; the perennial cases of unprovoked, nearly homicidal beatings by guards that lead to civil fines but no real disciplining of corrections staff; ghastly, preventable death in prison hospitals for lack of basic care; a quadriplegic inmate in Indiana, permanently confined to a prison hospital bed and denied all rehabilitative programming and educational opportunities for years upon years.

But not all the news is bad. There's still inmate resistance and politics, despite the repression. In the L.A. County jail, prisoners staged a hunger strike when authorities restricted access to law libraries, In federal prisons, what were billed as "race riots" with no coherent demands were in fact riots -- marked by unprecedented racial solidarity -- protesting disparities in sentencing guidelines that punish crack crimes 100 times more severely than those of powder cocaine.

Nor is Celling confined to reporting matters of life on the inside. One of the best investigative pieces details the rise of Washington State's "Three Strikes" ballot initiative. After several failed attempts, the initiative was catapulted to victory by a clique of superwealthy mavericks and the National Rifle Association. Without vital N.R.A. cash the initiative probably would not have passed and public concern about crime might have been more focused on preventive measures like gun control and less on the vindictive, moralizing politics of punishment. Another fine story deals with corruption and indictments among some of the top brass at Corrections Corporation of America, the world's largest private jailer [see Eric Bates, "Prisons for Profit," January 5].

P.L.N.'s record of watertight reporting and measured tone has won it fans like journalists Ken Silverstein and William Greider. At times the writing, Dan Pens's in particular, is marked by a dry and tightly coiled wit that, one suspects, comes from living in a social powder keg. One wishes there were a bit more of that, and a few more overview pieces. For example, the important and barely constitutional Prison Litigation Act of 1996 goes unmentioned, as do the questions of racial politics and prison rape, except for sexual abuse of female prisoners.

Ultimately, one of the most important contributions of The Celling of America is the lesson that prisoners must be allowed to speak and write if society is to understand the realities of incarceration. With states like California, Pennsylvania and Virginia making it illegal for the press to interview inmates, the need for prisoner journalism is more pressing than ever.

Other reviews of "The Celling of America":

LiP Magazine review
Z Magazine review
Amazon.com review
November Coalition review

2) "Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor," edited by Tara Herivel and Paul Wright

Book review by Las Vegas City Life

November 12, 2003

America behind bars: The United States is well on its way to becoming a Prison Nation

By Saab Lofton

How many cop shows/movies have portrayed the police as being too hamstrung by the rules to do their job? How many have shown that the only answer is to disregard said rules in order to get results -- no matter what path of destruction is left in the wake?

With such an overwhelming cultural force spreading such a Machiavellian message, it's a miracle only 2 million people are in the U.S. prison system today. By the way, that's half a million more than an overpopulated dictatorship like Stalinist China has locked away, so what does that say?

It says Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine won that Oscar for a reason. The film was, among other things, an overdue analysis of how a fear-based culture will lock up whole populations whether there's a need to do so or not (and there's not, since the rate of violent crimes has dropped or remained stagnant for nearly 20 years). Now joining the fight to keep suburbia's phobias in check is the must-read anthology of essays Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor (Routledge, $14.99).

Prison Nation opens with the kind of statistics that haven't been heard of since the last time a Nazi was on trial for war crimes: "Largely because of racially biased drug sentencing laws, about half of America's prison population is African American and one-quarter of all black men are likely to be imprisoned at some point during their lifetimes."

This means 1 million blacks are currently under the umbrella of the justice system. It's almost as if there's a conscious effort to negate the Million Man March, or something. And all anyone has to do is check the numbers out for themselves. Please do so before ignorantly dismissing the aforementioned info as a "conspiracy theory" or "biased propaganda," as is done by white America all too often.

In his contribution to this anthology, Noam Chomsky says the war on blacks -- oops, on drugs -- is nothing new: "It goes back to England in the nineteenth century when they made gin illegal and kept whiskey legal. There was a simple class reason for it. Gin was the drink of the working class and whiskey was the drink of the upper class. This is a way of controlling the working class people."

The contributors to Prison Nation are either established authors or actual prisoners. There's Anne-Marie Cusac, managing editor of The Progressive, whose 1996 exposé on the stun belt won her the George Polk Award for magazine reporting. And then there's California prisoner Willie Wisely, who writes about a secret gang of dissatisfied prison guards called the Cowboys who "punch, kick and torture chained and cuffed prisoners."

The Cowboys, indeed. What other culture on the planet would've named such an abomination that of all things?

Each of the essays is easy to read and accurate, so some other excuse will have to be concocted in order to justify not giving Prison Nation the amount of attention a piece of trash like The Bell Curve received. Not wanting to sympathize with a criminal, perhaps? Almost in anticipation of this, Prison Nation also includes an entire section on jail rape guaranteed to disturb even the desensitized.

Sunday Daskalea was a Greek immigrant facing cocaine charges in 1995. When the guards in her cell block found out she was also an erotic dancer, Daskalea was pressured into doing a striptease -- in full view of the prison's staff -- as a fellow prisoner "poured baby oil" all over her nude body.

But the scariest thing about Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor is the line from its co-editor, Tara Herivel: "With two million incarcerated, the experience of prison had now become normalized for many communities."

Other reviews of "Prison Nation":

Monthly Review book review
Yes Magazine review
Real Change News review
Correctional Law Reporter review (.pdf file)
Columbia Political Review
WorkingForChange.com review
Public Administration Review
The Oregonian review
Capital Times (WI) review

3) "Prison Profiteers," edited by Paul Wright and Tara Herivel

Book Review by the San Diego Union-Tribune

Charting the invisible empire

'Prison Profiteers' offers a fresh view of the business of incarceration

Reviewed by Barbara Davenport

January 6, 2008

Thirty years into an era of harsher sentencing laws and unprecedented prison expansion, America is reaping the fruits of its policies. “Prison Profiteers,” whose contributors are lawyers, journalists, scholars, policy analysts and current and former prisoners, takes a hard look at the human and financial costs to the people who have suffered from them, the corporations who have profited from this vigorous growth industry and the taxpayers who foot the bill.

Some facts: The United States has 5 percent of the world's population, and 25 percent of the world's prisoners. In 1975, the combined state and federal prison population of this country was 300,000 men and women. By 2006, it had exploded to 2.3 million.

This growth occurred in an era in which private enterprise was believed to be better equipped than government to respond to a variety of public needs, and do the job more effectively. Many of the constraints on the marketplace were significantly loosened or dismantled. We are now discovering, in arenas as diverse as drug safety, the selling of electric power and the pricing of home mortgages, that the marketplace's unseen hand often plants its thumb, sometimes its whole fist, on the scales.

With thorough research and reporting, the articles in this collection document the thumb on the scales in a range of industries from inmate health care toTaser manufacture. They expose the alliance between corporate vendors and state officials and legislators, and the violations of common sense and correctional policy endemic in an industry that is invisible to most of us.

Here are two examples:

* Steve Jackson, a professor of media studies at the University of Michigan, writes about the costs of making phone calls from prison. Since the early 1990s, as a competitive telecommunications environment has caused phone charges to fall for most users, fees for prisoners' calls out have risen sharply. A 15-minute phone call may cost an inmate's family, depending on the state, $10 to $17. Many states collect a percentage of the phone service provider's income, a situation that creates aperverse incentive to seek the highest bidder rather than the lowest. In California, Global Tel Link provides inmate phone services, and its contract specifies that 65 percent of income from prisoner's calls is paid to the state. In 2006, California collected $26 million from inmates' families. These costs can force a choice for low-income families: pay the rent or maintain contact with a spouse or parent in prison. Many families reduce or do without contact for years. Decades of research and experience support the importance of continued communication between prisoners and families as one of the major deterrents to recidivism. Jackson writes that “a reliable way of increasing the likelihood that prisoners will reoffend is to break all ties with the outside world, and then place them back on the street in a community to which they have become a stranger.” A practice that discourages connection amounts to a disturbingly counterproductive piece of public policy.

* “Million dollar blocks” is the term for urban blocks that produce so many inmates that a state spends a million dollars a year or more on their incarceration. Reporter Jennifer Gonnerman describes a New York prison reformer's use of mapping software to produce the first maps that showed these concentrations. Better than any description or database, these maps demonstrate that a large fraction of a state's prisoners come from a few small areas. The maps have helped state legislators ask whether some of those millions would be better spent on the services that keep people out of prisons: easily available substance abuse treatment, effective job training and adult schools, good outpatient mental health care. Connecticut has already shifted its investments, and Louisiana, with the highest incarceration rate in the country, is developing a plan.

Although “Prison Profiteers” will be indispensable reading for reformers, it is also an easy and accessible read – and a necessary one: California's budget commits more than $9 billion to corrections. It's a growth industry.

Other reviews of "Prison Profiteers":