Shane Bauer Quotes

When I get home, I draw a bath. I pour a glass of wine, then another, and another. I try to empty my mind. Inside me there is a prison guard and a former prisoner and they are fighting with each other, and I want them to stop.

CCA finds ways to minimize its obligation to provide adequate health care. At the out-of-state prisons where California ships some of its inmates, CCA will not accept any prisoners who are over sixty-five years old, have mental health issues, or serious conditions like HIV. The company's Idaho prison contract specified that the 'primary criteria' for screening incoming offenders was 'no chronic mental health or health care issues.' The contracts of some CCA prisons in Tennessee and Hawaii stipulate that the states will bear the cost of HIV treatment. Such exemptions allow CCA to tout its cost efficiency while taxpayers assume the medical expenses for the inmates the company won't take or treat.

How many times have such meetings been held throughout American history? How many times have men. be they private prison executives or convict lessees, gotten together to perform this ritual? They sit in company headquarters or legislative offices, far from their prisons or labor camps, and craft stories that soothe their consciences. They convince themselves, with remarkable ease, that they are in the business of punishment because it makes the world better, not because it makes them rich.

We take comfort in the notion of an unbridgeable gulf between good and evil, but maybe we should understand, as Zimbardo's work suggested, that evil is incremental - something we are all capable of, given the right circumstances.