About this item
When the tough-on-crime politics of the 1980s overcrowded state prisons, private companies saw potential profit in building and operating correctional facilities. Today more than a hundred thousand of the 1.5 million incarcerated Americans are held in private prisons in twenty-nine states and federal corrections. Private prisons are criticized for making money off mass incarceration -- to the tune of $5 billion in annual revenue. Based on Lauren-Brooke Eisens work as a prosecutor, journalist, and attorney at policy think tanks, Inside Private Prisons blends investigative reportage and quantitative and historical research to analyze privatized corrections in America.. From divestment campaigns to boardrooms to private immigration-detention centers across the Southwest, Eisen examines private prisons through the eyes of inmates, their families, correctional staff, policymakers, activists, Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees, undocumented immigrants, and the executives of Americas largest private prison corporations. Private prisons have become ground zero in the anti-mass-incarceration movement. Universities have divested from these companies, political candidates hesitate to accept their campaign donations, and the Department of Justice tried to phase out its contracts with them. On the other side, impoverished rural towns often try to lure the for-profit prison industry to build facilities and create new jobs. Neither an endorsement or a demonization, Inside Private Prisons details the complicated and perverse incentives rooted in the industry, from mandatory bed occupancy to vested interests in mass incarceration. If private prisons are here to stay, how can we fix them? This book is a blueprint for policymakers to reform practices and for concerned citizens to understand our changing carceral landscape.
About the Author
Lauren-Brooke Eisen is Senior Counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a nonpartisan law and policy institute that seeks to improve systems of democracy and justice. Eisen works in the Justice Program at the Brennan Center where she focuses on improving the criminal justice process through legal reforms, specifically how the criminal justice system is funded.
Previously Eisen was a Senior Program Associate at the Vera Institute of Justice in the Center on Sentencing and Corrections where she worked on policies that aimed to improve public safety while reducing prison populations. Eisen also served as an assistant district attorney in New York City where she served in the Appeals Bureau, the Criminal Court Bureau, and the Sex Crimes Special Victims Bureau where she prosecuted a wide range of misdemeanor and felony cases. Before entering law school, Eisen worked as a beat reporter for a daily newspaper in Laredo, Texas where she covered criminal justice issues. Eisen has taught an undergraduate seminar on mass incarceration at Yale, served as an adjunct instructor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and supervises NYU Law students who participate in the Brennan Center Public Policy Advocacy Clinic.
Her work has been published in USA Today, Politico, Time, Fortune, The Marshall Project, MSNBC, US News & World Report, Roll Call, The Hill, HuffPo, Daily News, Vox, The National Book Review, The Crime Report, Hollywood Reporter, The Times-Picayune, The New York Law Journal, and The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Eisen has appeared on National Public Radio, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, Washington Post TV, and Al Jazeera News and was featured in the documentary Redeeming The State.
She serves on the Advisory Council of the New York City Bar's Task Force on Mass Incarceration and holds an AB from Princeton University and a JD from the Georgetown University Law Center. She is the author of Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Columbia University, 2017) .
