Author and oral historian Matthew Vernon Whalan joined me on The Zero Hour to discuss his new book, Bullock: Chronicles of Deprivation and Despair in an American Prison, an oral history of life inside an Alabama prison.
The book is both grim and gripping. It addresses both the shocking conditions—overflowing sewage, vermin infestations, overcrowding, lack of sanitation, and drug trafficking facilitated by staff—and the systemic nature of mass incarceration, rooted in the state’s history of slavery and forced labor. It’s an important glimpse into the horrors that still exist in the 21st-century USA.