Prutsman, who served as a lieutenant in the Seventh Regiment, Wisconsin Volunteers, recounts his experiences in Libby prison, Richmond, and in prisons in Columbia, S.C., and elsewhere.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

"Andersonville" is one of the best accounts about the Civil War. McElroy, the author, vividly tells his story about the time he spent as a prisoner of Andersonville and a few other Confederate prisons he was kept at. The book is full of interesting stories and amazing facts about the Confederate prison system and the way prisoners were treated in the South!

The Civil War historian and author of A Season of Slaughter continues his engaging account of the Overland Campaign in this vivid chronicle. By May of 1864, Federal commander Ulysses S. Grant had resolved to destroy his Confederate adversaries through attrition if by no other means. Meanwhile, his Confederate counterpart, Robert E. Lee, looked for an opportunity to regain the offensive initiative. “We must strike them a blow,” he told his lieutenants. But Grant’s war of attrition began to take its toll in a more insidious way. Both army commanders—exhausted and fighting off illness—began to feel the continuous, merciless grind of combat in very personal ways. Punch-drunk tired, they began to second-guess themselves, missing opportunities and making mistakes. As a result, along the banks of the North Anna River, commanders on both sides brought their armies to the brink of destruction without even knowing it.

The 2004 revelations of detainee maltreatment at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad, Iraq have led to an exhaustive overhaul of Army doctrine and training with respect to this topic. The Army has identified disconnects in its individual, leader, and collective training programs, and has also identified the absence of a deliberate, focused doctrinal crosswalk between the two principal branches concerned with detainees, Military Intelligence (MI) and Military Police (MP). These problems and their consequences are real and immediate. The perceptions of just treatment held by citizens of our nation and, to a great extent the world at large, have been and are being shaped by the actions of the US Army, both in the commission of detainee maltreatment but also, and more importantly, in the way the Army addresses its institutional shortcomings. This study examines the relationship over time between doctrine in two branches of the Army Military Police (MP) and Military Intelligence (MI) and the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (GPW). Specifically, it analyzes the MP detention field manual series and the MI interrogation field manual series to evaluate their GPW content. It also further examines the relationship of military police and military intelligence to each other in the enemy prisoner-of-war (EPW) and detainee operations environment, as expressed in their doctrinal manuals. Finally, the study looks at the Army's experience in detainee operations through the prism of six conflicts or contingency operations: the Korean War, Vietnam, Operation URGENT FURY (Grenada, 1983), Operation JUST CAUSE (Panama, 1989), Operation DESERT STORM (Iraq, 1991), and Operation UPHOLD DEMOCRACY (Haiti, 1994).

An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” —NPR.org New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018 * One of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2018 * Winner of the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize * Winner of the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism * Winner of the 2019 RFK Book and Journalism Award * A New York Times Notable Book A ground-breaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in America: in one Louisiana prison and over the course of our country's history. In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background check. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough, and in short order he wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award and became the most-read feature in the history of the magazine Mother Jones. Still, there was much more that he needed to say. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. For, as he soon realized, we can't understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery, and the echoes of these shameful origins are with us still. The private prison system is deliberately unaccountable to public scrutiny. Private prisons are not incentivized to tend to the health of their inmates, or to feed them well, or to attract and retain a highly-trained prison staff. Though Bauer befriends some of his colleagues and sympathizes with their plight, the chronic dysfunction of their lives only adds to the prison's sense of chaos. To his horror, Bauer finds himself becoming crueler and more aggressive the longer he works in the prison, and he is far from alone. A blistering indictment of the private prison system, and the powerful forces that drive it, American Prison is a necessary human document about the true face of justice in America.