tw: This post discusses suicide, as well as mistreatment, neglect, and abuse of prison residents.

In 2014, Shane Bauer took a job with the Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic), serving as a guard at Winn Correctional Center for nine dollars an hour. He stayed for four months, at which point his cover was blown (though an illegal search of his coworker’s photography equipment), and he had to resign. He writes in American Prison about his experiences in this time, as well as the history of the American carceral project, with an emphasis on convict labor. (Convict labor is slavery. It’s literally just slavery they made a special exception for in the Constitution.)

Perhaps the most damning feature of the book is Bauer’s footnotes. Throughout the book there are footnotes with CCA’s responses to Bauer’s requests for comment. E.g., “CCA’s spokesman says the company had no knowledge of security checks being skipped or logbooks being falsified.” It starts to feel like CCA is saying “who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” During Bauer’s time at Winn, his coworkers regularly falsify records, and his supervisor seems aghast at the idea that the prison should be responsible for supplying healthcare to inmates who fall ill. One inmate repeatedly told guards that he was suicidal; nobody brought him to suicide watch. He attempted suicide in his cell and was transferred to a hospital, where he died. CCA claims that suicide rates in their prisons are lower than in public prisons. But because this inmate’s death occurred at the hospital, not the prison, CCA does not have to report it. In a case where CCA is clearly culpable for an inmate’s death, their records do not include that death at all.

At the end of the book, Bauer attends a CoreCivic shareholders’ meeting. (Since Trump’s election, CoreCivic stock is through the roof.) The board chairman assures the assembled stockholders that they don’t have to feel nervous about folks protesting private prison companies and them, specifically. Even when he worked at Bridgestone, he tells them, the company had critics! He laughs. What I know about Bridgestone, and what Shane Bauer learned later, is that Bridgestone’s critics did not care for Bridgestone’s use of child labor in Liberian rubber farms. Thumbs up dot gif.

In conclusion, convict labor is slavery. Our carceral system is an abusive hellscape with no regard for the humanity of the people whose lives it consumes. Tell your friends.

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In the wake of Black Lives Matter pulling out of the Pride parade in San Francisco due to increased police presence, some thoughts on the disconnect between the two major civil rights fights of our day.

A profile of our nation’s top ASL interpreter for hip-hop artists. My one complaint about this article is that it does not include sufficient videos of Amber Galloway Gallego being awesome.

Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer spent four months as a guard in a for-profit prison in Louisiana and wrote a massive report on it. It’s basically exactly what you’d expect from our broken-ass prison system.

Suki Kim, author of Without You There Is No Us, talks about categorizing her book (a work of investigative journalism) as a memoir, and the persistent devaluing of women’s work. It made me scrutinize my own reaction to the ethics of her book, and I hope I’ll be more cognizant of that when reviewing journalism by women in the future.

Why plots are so important (also, has anyone read Emily Barton’s book, The Book of Esther? I am tentatively interested but want more information from y’all).

Your summer comic book recommendations, from Kieron Gillen, Kate Leth, and Marjorie Liu. Bid adieu to your productivity.

Queerbaiting in Captain America

The Millions released their book preview for the second half of 2016, and it is EPIC. I also discovered just yesterday that there’s a nonfiction one too.

THE SCIENCE OF BOOKS: All books everywhere with no exceptions whatsoever¹ follows one of six emotional arcs. Oh how I love a taxonomy, my precious.

Rumaan Alam inquires what makes a book diverse, and wonders if his own novel — about straight white women — can be considered diverse.²

On Twitter last week I told a story about a good dog from history that doesn’t die tragically. You can read that story here.

Finally, and completely frivolously, please enjoy this wonderful review of the Blake Lively shark movie by Wesley Morris (one of my favorite cultural critics ever), which is brilliant on the subject of interchangeable celebrities.

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