Inside Private Prisons

John Pfaff, author of Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform:
In a welcome departure from much of the work on private prisons, Eisen doesn’t view the profit motive as inherently wrong, but rather asks the important question of how (and whether) we can structure firms’ incentives to achieve more just outcomes.

Carol S. Steiker, Harvard University:
Questioned during the Obama administration and embraced during the Trump administration, prisons run by private corporations remain a controversial part of the penal landscape in the United States. This book provides a comprehensive and fair-minded look at American private prisons, explaining how such prisons were a product and sometimes a propelling force of mass incarceration. Eisen provides invaluable insight into how private prisons actually operate, why they are likely to continue to exist, and what can be done to make them safer, more effective, and more humane instruments of criminal justice.

Ernest Drucker, author of A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America:
Lauren-Brooke Eisen illuminates the history of private prisons and their place in the current environment and the future of mass incarceration in America—which we are trying to minimize. She incorporates individual interviews with a collation of quantitative data to strike a balance between fine detail and the big picture of the complex and still-evolving discourse of private corrections; a vital discussion for the future of our criminal justice and immigration policies.

Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy:
Lauren-Brooke Eisen’s study of private prisons is long awaited, powerful, and a critically important read for all citizens who seek to understand the relationship between profit and incarceration, and who hope to protect those who find themselves locked up in private facilities across the nation. From Colorado to South Texas to Wisconsin, and from CCA/CiviCore to GEO Group, Eisen takes us inside a world that many of us revile, but know virtually nothing about. She not only explodes many a myth about private prisons as well as detention centers but ultimately offers an invaluable blueprint for humanizing them. Like it or not, she points out, they are real places where real people, at least for the foreseeable future, will be contained.

David Simon, creator of The Wire:
Inside Private Prisons is a careful, discerning assessment of our transformation of human incarceration into product and profit. Lauren-Brooke Eisen has compiled a definitive history of the phenomenon and has done so with more precision and equanimity than many of us can manage. If you want to intelligently argue about the modern prison-industrial complex, begin your studies here.