Follows the experiences of journalist Shane Bauer on his four-month stint as a nine-dollar-an-hour, entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. Bauer records what he saw and uncovered about for-profit prisons in America and exposes the inequality he saw there, such as the fact that private prisons are not incentivized to care about their prisoners' health, and also comments on how he himself found his character becoming more aggressive and cruel the longer he worked there.