"The military-industrial complex has given way to a prison-industrial complex," he writes. "Like military bases, prisons provide jobs while simultaneously providing a sense of security -- in their case not from communists but from criminals."

Hallinan is bothered by America's indifference to the mandatory-sentencing laws that created a steady flow of prisoners, the abandonment of rehabilitation and the corporate exploitation of criminals, most of whom are African-American. But he's more storyteller than advocate. His book reads like the diary of an outsider trying to understand why the richest country in the world has turned law and order into a business.

These days, Hallinan covers manufacturing for the Wall Street Journal. But in a conversation about "Going up the River," he explains why prisons have become attractive moneymakers, waxes soulfully on how to turn the system around and describes why the prison boom might soon bust.

Your book is filled with bizarre images: the guard armed with a cellphone and not a gun, a psychiatrist counseling an inmate through the single slit in his cell's door, prison lights bright enough to obscure the stars for miles around. What is the most distressing observation you made about American prisons?

It's the injection into the correction system of motives that have very little to do with corrections -- profit, for one. An analogous situation is what you're seeing in schools right now, where Coke is introducing Coke machines and encouraging educators to push Coke on the students by splitting profits with the school. There's been a backlash there because people say, "Hey, if a principal is busy trying to sell Cokes to kids, he's not busy educating the kids, and that detracts from the purpose of the school."

It's the same way with the prisons. You introduce a profit motive into prisons and pretty soon people's attention gets focused on the profits and not on the inmates and the business at hand. That, to me, is the big switch. For 150 years we tried -- sometimes with little success -- to build institutions that actually corrected people. But in the early '80s we pretty much abandoned that.

When and why did the industry move from a rehabilitation motive to a profit motive?

The No. 1 reason would clearly be economics. In a lot of small towns in America in the early '80s, many factories started moving offshore. A little later, you had military bases start to close down. In certain parts of the country -- Texas in particular -- you had the combination of an oil bust and the savings and loan bust. All of these factors combined to make small towns very desperate for jobs.

At the same time an [anti-rehabilitation] backlash was going on throughout the country. It began in the early '70s with the riot at Attica. People were fed up with so-called liberal prisons, where inmates had "all the rights" -- a phrase that's often used. So you saw after Attica a backlash against these prisons. In the mid-'70s, for example, Ronald Reagan started calling for what would become the first "supermax" prisons.

And then came the big drug war movement, of course, and that began in the early '80s. In 1984, in particular, the federal government did away with parole, replacing it with federal sentencing guidelines. That ensured a steady flow of inmates into the prisons.

Is there anything inherently wrong with bringing a profit motive into the prison industry? Couldn't you argue that the injection of competition and profit creates greater efficiency and attracts higher-caliber guards, making for a better prison?

That would be the theory, but I haven't seen any evidence that it works out that way. The private prison companies have yet to conclusively demonstrate that their prisons are cheaper than publicly operated ones. They may point to one that says "yes," but there's another offsetting study that says "no."

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.