Going up the river : travels in a prison nation

Summary: "A few years ago, Joe Hallinan, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, met a tough law-and-order Texan named Jack Kyle, who had been a Texas prison warden in the 1960s and had worked in the penal system nearly all his adult life. It used to be, Kyle told Hallinan, that nobody wanted prisons. But after the Texas economy went bust in the mid-1980s, people began to reconsider prisons, and "now, ever'body wants 'em." Kyle believed in locking people up too, he said, but things had gotten out of hand." "Just how out of hand things have gotten is the subject of Going Up the River, Hallinan's groundbreaking exploration of one of America's biggest growth industries, its prisons. No nation in the world incarcerates a higher percentage of its people than the United States. In the last twenty years, the nation's prison population has more than quadrupled, to more than 1.3 million. So common is the prison experience in America that the federal government predicts that one of every eleven men will be imprisoned during his lifetime."--BOOK JACKET.