Hallinan thinks the conspiracy theory too crude. "But you now have enough businessmen - and corrupt politicians - with a financial interest in heightening the public perception of crime and expanding the prison industry," he concedes. "Fear drives the whole machine."
All over the US, Hallinan encountered a common perception of soaring crime. Yet most people, particularly in prison loving states like Texas, could not cite personal examples. "I gradually began to see it as parallel to the Communist scare in the 1950s," Hallinan recalls. "Back then, the generalised fear bred a huge military arsenal. Now it breeds prisons."
Affluent white Americans fear crime the most. But black Americans suffer it most and have a disproportionate chance of being imprisoned. Today's prison population is 49 per cent black and 18 per cent Hispanic. That statistic represents one of the largest migrations in American history: of young urban men, mostly belonging to minorities, to new prisons. "In the black community, this is seen as black men being exported to white areas to make a profit for the white man," explains Hallinan. "It's not slavery, of course. These people have committed crimes and deserve to be punished. But in the black community the echoes of slavery are extremely strong."
To which most Americans might respond: "So what. Jail should be tough." For hardliners, the new "supermax" jail - with its sanitising corporate language and its emphasis on profit and efficiency - may even sound too nice.
Hardly. "These concrete cubicles are so spartan, so devoid of stimulation, that their success is measured . . . by how much inmates detest them," Hallinan writes of the newest facilities where inmates are locked in windowless cells. "They press the outer bounds of what most humans can psychologically tolerate," one judge recently concluded.
"I go into those cells every day," the New England prison worker agrees, "and they are mind-altering, designed to break a man down. I'm surprised more don't try to kill themselves."
Working inside the booming new prison economy takes its own toll. On April 21st, the New York Times reported "a severe shortage of guards around the country", partly due to the "explosion of prison building" and increased prison violence. The starting salary for a guard averages $23,000, but desperate states like Oklahoma are now lowering their minimum recruitment age from 21 to 18.
"You know what your duties are today," Curt Bowman, president of the officers' union at "Little Siberia", a maximum-security prison on the Canadian border, tells his recruits. "Go to work. Come out alive." Hallinan's book is filled with chilling reports of inmate and officer brutality. So why work inside? "My wife and I have been married 28 years and lived 19 years in a travel trailer," one guard responds. Another says: "Be 54 and try to go out and buy health insurance."
Even its supporters admit that the current system brutalises inmates and enforcers alike. Opponents of prison expansion and privatisation question not only the individual but also the social cost. "Educating children, punishing criminals - these are government responsibilities," insists Staudter, contemplating his town's new prison. "But the way they feed people into the prison system now, a kid has a better chance of going to jail than of going to college."
Joe Hallinan predicts that a slowing economy may teach states how expensive their new prisons really are. In 1980, prisons cost each US citizen an average of $30 per year; by 1992, they cost $123 per year. But for now, the industry grows, expanding its markets in Europe, Australia and Africa (nine UK prisons are currently owned or managed by Wackenhut). Sitting on the hood of his car one night, counting the stars in the south Texas night sky, Joe Hallinan noticed "an incandescent glow where no lights should be. After a while it occurred to me that what I was seeing was not the light of some forgotten town, but the glow of a new American city". Prison, USA.
Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation by Joseph T. Hallinan is published by Random House (hardback, $24.95 in US).