Every year, The New York Public Library gives the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism to a journalist whose work brings clarity and public attention to important issues, events, or policies. In this series, we will be focusing on each of the five 2019 finalists announced March 5, 2019. Today, we discuss American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment by Shane Bauer.

Iranian Prisoner to American Corrections Officer

American Prison is a compulsively readable revelation about life on the inside of a private prison. Shane Bauer, a reporter for Mother Jones, spent four months working undercover as a $9-per-hour guard in the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana.

Winn is a prison run by Correctional Corporation of America, which boasts that it houses nearly 70,000 of the 128,000 Americans living in private prisons. Bauer's peerless reporting, which relies primarily on secret recordings he made while on the job, reveal a parade of degradations and indignities done to inmates and employees alike, all driven by a company's dedication to its bottom line. He depicts a facility understaffed at nearly every level, where violence is quotidian, medical treatment is laughable, and preventable trauma is shrugged off by everyone.

Alongside the portrait of human suffering, Bauer sketches a history of private prisons in America, and traces the ways in which our country's racist and classist tendencies facilitated a systematic and enduring exploitation of human labor under the auspices of "corrections."

Read Mother Jones, and over 100 other current magazine titles through the Library's subscription to Flipster, a digital magazine platform. 

—Aidan Flax-Clark, Associate Director, Public Programs, 2019 Library Review Committee Member

Learn about the other Bernstein Awards finalists for 2019.
 

More about the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism

The Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism was established by The New York Public Library in 1987 in honor of journalist Helen Bernstein Fealy.  Each year, finalists for are selected by a nine-member Library Review Committee. Winners are then chosen by a separate Bernstein Selection Committee. Eligible books are published in calendar year 2018 and the author must be currently working as a journalist, or someone who has worked in journalism for a significant portion of his or her career, whether as a reporter or commentator in newspapers, magazines, or broadcasting, i.e. print, broadcast, or online journalism. The book's subject matter must be journalistic in nature, with potential for influencing public opinion or policy, and draws public attention to important current issues or events of global/national significance.