Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation [Paperback]

The American prison system has grown tenfold in thirty years, while crime rates have been relatively flat: 2 million people are behind bars on any given day, more prisoners than in any other country in the world — half a million more than in Communist China, and the largest prison expansion the world has ever known. In Going Up The River, Joseph Hallinan gets to the heart of America’s biggest growth industry, a self-perpetuating prison-industrial complex that has become entrenched without public awareness, much less voter consent. He answers, in an extraordinary way, the essential question: What, in human terms, is the price we pay? He has looked for answers to that question in every corner of the “prison nation,” a world far off the media grid — the America of struggling towns and cities left behind by the information age and desperate for jobs and money. Hallinan shows why the more prisons we build, the more prisoners we create, placating everyone at the expense of the voiceless prisoners, who together make up one of the largest migrations in our nation’s history.Joseph Hallinan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has been writing about the criminal-justice system for almost a decade, first as a local reporter and later as a nationally syndicated correspondent for the Newhouse News Service. In 1997, Hallinan was named a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where he continued to investigate American prisons. He now writes for The Wall Street Journal and lives in Chicago.CHAPTER 1

There are two prisons in Beeville, Texas. One sits on the site of a recently closed naval air base and is known as the Garza Unit. The other is known as the McConnell Unit.

Beeville, like many prison towns, is a remote place. It lies on the brushy plains of South Texas between San Antonio and Corpus Christi, but it is no closer than an hour's driló+