Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration with Lauren-Brooke Eisen

Today, more than 100,000 of the 1.5 million locked up in state and federal prisons are held in private prisons. Loren Eisen will present important findings about how these prisons operate and the vast expansion of private immigration-detention centers.

Are these private prisons driving the rise in mass incarceration — or are they a symptom of deeper factors that have led to the U.S. having the highest incarceration rate in the world?

“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…”
— Heather Ann Thompson, author Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Aftermath

“Inside Private Prisons is a careful, discerning assessment of our transformation of human incarceration into product and profit…”
— David Simoncreator of The Wire

Loren-Brooke Eisen is Senior Counsel in the Brennan Center’s Justice Program at NYU Law School.