by Sid Holt
At the outset, the park was an orphan idea with no clarity of purpose, no staff, no budget. Congress seemed to lose interest as soon as the ink of Grant’s signature dried. The idea that the park should protect wildlife as well as geysers and canyons was an afterthought. Yellowstone became a disaster zone. Market hunters operated brazenly in the park, killing elk, bison, bighorn sheep, and other ungulates in industrial quantities, until the U.S. Army was brought in to handle enforcement. An elk hide was worth six to eight dollars, serious money, and a man might kill twenty-five to fifty elk in a day. Antlers littered the hillsides. Wagon tourists came and went unsupervised, at low numbers but with relatively high impact, some of them vandalizing geyser cones, carving their names on the scenery, killing a trumpeter swan or other wildlife for the hell of it.
Even after the National Park Service replaced the army in 1916, persecution of the “bad” animals in the park—meaning mostly the predators, as distinct from the gentle herbivores—continued unfettered. One superintendent even encouraged commercial trappers to kill beavers by the hundreds so that they wouldn’t build dams and flood his park. Otters were classified as predatory, that damning label, and for a while there was a fatwa against skunks. Wolf killing ended only when the wolves were all gone, not just from Yellowstone (by around 1930) but throughout the American West. Poisoning and shooting of coyotes continued until about 1935.
Bears, especially grizzly bears (though black bears are also present), have always been a different and more complicated matter. Grizzlies are omnivores, smart and opportunistic. From the early years of the park, they learned to accept handouts from passing travelers and to forage on humans’ garbage. Later, by the hotels at Old Faithful, on the lake, and near the Grand Canyon, large garbage dumps became theaters where tourists sat on bleacher seats to watch the “bear show” on summer evenings. For eighty years, Yellowstone’s grizzlies and black bears consumed food refuse in vast quantities, coming to depend on it unwholesomely, with the blessings of the park managers and to the amusement of the visiting public. The closure of those dumps during the early 1970s, when management ideas shifted toward more “natural” regulation, precipitated a crisis of hungry desperation among grizzlies that brought the population way down and resulted, in 1975, in the bear’s listing as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.
Today Yellowstone is the eponym of a great ecosystem, the biggest and richest complex of mostly untamed landscape and wildlife within the lower forty-eight states. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is an amoeboid expanse of landscape encompassing two national parks (Grand Teton is the second) as well as national forests, wildlife refuges, and other public and private holdings, the whole shebang amounting to 22.6 million acres, an order of magnitude bigger than Yellowstone Park itself. Surrounding this great amoeba is a modest transition zone, where you will more likely find cattle than elk, more likely see a grain elevator than a grizzly bear, and more likely hear the bark of a black Labrador than the howl of a wolf. Bounding that buffer is twenty-first-century America: highways, towns, parking lots, malls, endlessly sprawling suburbs, golf courses, Starbucks.
Within the ecosystem, everything is connected. That’s the first lesson not just of ecology but also of resource politics. The wolf is connected to the grizzly bear by way of their competition for ungulate prey, especially elk calves and adult elk that have been weakened by winter or the rigors of the autumn rut. Because whitebark pine seeds constitute another important food for grizzlies, the bears are connected to the mountain pine beetle, which kills the pines in increasingly severe outbreaks related to climate change. Bison are connected to Montana livestock policy by way of a disease called brucellosis, probably brought to America in cattle.
Such interconnections underscore the truth of a truism: that the ecosystem is an intricate, interactive compoundment of living creatures, relationships, physical factors, geological circumstances, historical accidents, and biological processes. The changes that ricochet through these networks of connection, from animal to plant, predator to prey, one level of the food web to another, are a focus of interest, and disagreement, among scientists who study the wildlife and vegetation of Yellowstone. The details become almost Talmudic in complexity, but what’s important to keep in mind is that disturbances have secondary effects, usually unforeseen, and that sometimes those effects are irreversible. Restoring wolves to Yellowstone, for example, does not necessarily fix all the problems that removing wolves from Yellowstone caused. Taking grizzlies off the list of threatened species will have consequences down the road too.
Preservation of the grizzly bear population is arguably the highest and best purpose of Yellowstone Park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. But that doesn’t oblige one to extreme pessimism over the bear’s prospects of survival, nor to distrust of agency biologists, many of whom believe that the bear’s intelligence and flexibility of behavior will keep it robust and numerous despite changes in the landscape that require greater reliance on some different foods. After all, they say, the grizzly is an omnivore, and although some of its traditionally most used food sources are in decline—spawning cutthroat trout, whitebark pine seeds—because of human-caused impacts on the ecosystem, there are 264 other choices on the known list of grizzly dietary items in Yellowstone. Change may come, these scientists say, but the bear will adapt to the challenge.
For the people who live within it, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is a focus of many hopes, ideals, and fond memories—but also of many angers, in part because it contains so many different expectations governed by different interests. Some hunters are angry that there aren’t enough elk. Some ranchers are angry that there are too many elk. Some wolf lovers are angry that wolves, including those that spend much of their year within the park, now may be hunted or trapped when they roam beyond the park boundaries. Some landowners in Gardiner, Montana, are angry that bison migrate out of the park in winter and into their yards. Some stockmen are angry that migrating bison carry brucellosis, which might be passed to their cows. Some wildlife activists are angry that bison from the park, once they migrate out, may be corralled and shipped to slaughter. Some range scientists are angry about overgrazed grasslands in the two parks, resulting from too many bison and elk. Some fishermen are angry about the slaughter of lake trout, an exotic species that’s being suppressed in Yellowstone Lake for the sake of the native cutthroat trout. Somebody somewhere is probably angry about coyotes. Scarcely a season passes, in the gateway towns of Cody and Jackson and Bozeman, without several public meetings, called by the various agencies, at which people express these angers.
Amid that push and pull, however, one important truth must be remembered: that the people who live and work and hunt and fish and hike within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem are not the sole possessors of legitimate interest.
This is America’s place, and the world’s.
Have we vastly improved this great area since the bad old days of commercial poaching and vandalism, governmental neglect, Wild West brigandage, and uncontrolled tourism development—or have we already gone a long way toward making it a big, boring suburb with antler-motif doorknobs?
Passionately dedicated people need to find collaborative solutions and to recognize that righteous intransigence is not a strategy; it’s just a satisfying attitude. The various agency members of the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee (the body that tries to oversee the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem as a comprehensive entity) need to add private groups as partners and to make bold decisions that transcend turf politics. Climate change seems to be hurting Yellowstone—by way of temperature ranges, insect cycles, drought, who knows what else—and we all need to do better on fixing that.
Ha, easier said than done. But if the Yellowstone grizzly bear is expected to adapt, modify its behavior, and cope with new realities, shouldn’t we be expected to do that too?
Mother Jones
WINNER—REPORTING
When Shane Bauer went to work as a pri
son guard at the oldest privately operated medium-security facility in the United States, no one seemed interested in his background—as a senior reporter at Mother Jones or as the coauthor of A Sliver of Light, the story of the two years he spent in an Iranian prison. Only later did they try to stop him from writing this story. Bauer’s 26,000-word account of his four months at Winn Correctional Center, supported by another fourteen months of reporting, earned Mother Jones the first of the two Ellies it won in 2017. The second was for Magazine of the Year. Judges praised the article not only for its quality but also for emulating the heroic work of investigative journalists from Nellie Bly to Ben Bagdikian.
Shane Bauer
My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard
Chapter 1: “Inmates Run This Bitch”
“Have you ever had a riot?” I ask a recruiter from a prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).
“The last riot we had was two years ago,” he says over the phone.
“Yeah, but that was with the Puerto Ricans!” says a woman’s voice, cutting in. “We got rid of them.”
“When can you start?” the man asks.
I tell him I need to think it over.
I take a breath. Am I really going to become a prison guard? Now that it might actually happen, it feels scary and a bit extreme.
I started applying for jobs in private prisons because I wanted to see the inner workings of an industry that holds 131,000 of the nation’s 1.6 million prisoners. As a journalist, it’s nearly impossible to get an unconstrained look inside our penal system. When prisons do let reporters in, it’s usually for carefully managed tours and monitored interviews with inmates. Private prisons are especially secretive. Their records often aren’t subject to public-access laws; CCA has fought to defeat legislation that would make private prisons subject to the same disclosure rules as their public counterparts. And even if I could get uncensored information from private prison inmates, how would I verify their claims? I keep coming back to this question: Is there any other way to see what really happens inside a private prison?
CCA certainly seemed eager to give me a chance to join its team. Within two weeks of filling out its online application, using my real name and personal information, several CCA prisons contacted me, some multiple times.
They weren’t interested in the details of my résumé. They didn’t ask about my job history, my current employment with the Foundation for National Progress, the publisher of Mother Jones, or why someone who writes about criminal justice in California would want to move across the country to work in a prison. They didn’t even ask about the time I was arrested for shoplifting when I was nineteen.
When I call Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana, the HR lady who answers is chipper and has a smoky Southern voice. “I should tell you upfront that the job only pays nine dollars an hour, but the prison is in the middle of a national forest. Do you like to hunt and fish?”
“I like fishing.”
“Well, there is plenty of fishing, and people around here like to hunt squirrels. You ever squirrel hunt?”
“No.”
“Well, I think you’ll like Louisiana. I know it’s not a lot of money, but they say you can go from a CO to a warden in just seven years! The CEO of the company started out as a CO”—a corrections officer.
Ultimately, I choose Winn. Not only does Louisiana have the highest incarceration rate in the world—more than 800 prisoners per 100,000 residents—but Winn is the oldest privately operated medium-security prison in the country.
I phone HR and tell her I’ll take the job.
“Well, poop can stick!” she says.
I pass the background check within twenty-four hours.
• • •
Two weeks later, in November 2014, having grown a goatee, pulled the plugs from my earlobes, and bought a beat-up Dodge Ram pickup, I pull into Winnfield, a hardscrabble town of 4,600 people three hours north of Baton Rouge. I drive past the former Mexican restaurant that now serves drive-thru daiquiris to people heading home from work, and down a street of collapsed wooden houses, empty except for a tethered dog. About 38 percent of households here live below the poverty line; the median household income is $25,000. Residents are proud of the fact that three governors came from Winnfield. They are less proud that the last sheriff was locked up for dealing meth.
Thirteen miles away, Winn Correctional Center lies in the middle of the Kisatchie National Forest, 600,000 acres of Southern yellow pines crosshatched with dirt roads. As I drive through the thick forest, the prison emerges from the fog. You might mistake the dull expanse of cement buildings and corrugated metal sheds for an oddly placed factory were it not for the office-park-style sign displaying CCA’s corporate logo, with the head of a bald eagle inside the “A.”
At the entrance, a guard who looks about sixty, a gun on her hip, asks me to turn off my truck, open the doors, and step out. A tall, stern-faced man leads a German shepherd into the cab of my truck. My heart hammers. I tell the woman I’m a new cadet, here to start my four weeks of training. She directs me to a building just outside the prison fence.
“Have a good one, baby,” she says as I pull through the gate. I exhale.
I park, find the classroom, and sit down with five other students.
“You nervous?” a nineteen-year-old black guy asks me. I’ll call him Reynolds. (I’ve changed the names and nicknames of the people I met in prison unless noted otherwise.)
“A little,” I say. “You?”
“Nah, I been around,” he says. “I seen killin’. My uncle killed three people. My brother been in jail, and my cousin.” He has scars on his arms. One, he says, is from a shootout in Baton Rouge. The other is from a street fight in Winnfield. He elbowed someone in the face, and the next thing he knew he got knifed from behind. “It was some gang shit.” He says he just needs a job until he starts college in a few months. He has a baby to feed. He also wants to put speakers in his truck. They told him he could work on his days off, so he’ll probably come in every day. “That will be a fat paycheck.” He puts his head down on the table and falls asleep.
The human resources director comes in and scolds Reynolds for napping. He perks up when she tells us that if we recruit a friend to work here, we’ll get 500 bucks. She gives us an assortment of other tips: Don’t eat the food given to inmates; don’t have sex with them or you could be fined $10,000 or get ten years at hard labor; try not to get sick because we don’t get paid sick time. If we have friends or relatives incarcerated here, we need to report it. She hands out fridge magnets with the number of a hotline to use if we feel suicidal or start fighting with our families. We get three counseling sessions for free.
I studiously jot down notes as the HR director fires up a video of the company’s CEO, Damon Hininger, who tells us what a great opportunity it is to be a corrections officer at CCA. Once a guard himself, he made $3.4 million in 2015, nearly nineteen times the salary of the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. “You may be brand new to CCA,” Hininger says, “but we need you. We need your enthusiasm. We need your bright ideas. During the academy, I felt camaraderie. I felt a little anxiety too. That is completely normal. The other thing I felt was tremendous excitement.”
I look around the room. Not one person—not the recent high school graduate, not the former Walmart manager, not the nurse, not the mother of twins who’s come back to Winn after ten years of McDonald’s and a stint in the military—looks excited.
“I don’t think this is for me,” a postal worker says.
“Do not run!”
The next day, I wake up at six a.m. in my apartment in the nearby town where I decided to live to minimize my chances of running into off-duty guards. I feel a shaky, electric nervousness as I put a pen that doubles as an audio recorder into my shirt pocket.
In class that day, we learn about the use of force. A middle-aged black instructor I’ll call Mr. Tucker comes into the classroom, his black fatig
ues tucked into shiny black boots. He’s the head of Winn’s Special Operations Response Team, or SORT, the prison’s SWAT-like tactical unit. “If an inmate was to spit in your face, what would you do?” he asks. Some cadets say they would write him up. One woman, who has worked here for thirteen years and is doing her annual retraining, says, “I would want to hit him. Depending on where the camera is, he might would get hit.”
Mr. Tucker pauses to see if anyone else has a response. “If your personality if somebody spit on you is to knock the fuck out of him, you gonna knock the fuck out of him,” he says, pacing slowly. “If a inmate hit me, I’m go’ hit his ass right back. I don’t care if the camera’s rolling. If a inmate spit on me, he’s gonna have a very bad day.” Mr. Tucker says we should call for backup in any confrontation. “If a midget spit on you, guess what? You still supposed to call for backup. You don’t supposed to ever get into a one-on-one encounter with anybody. Period. Whether you can take him or not. Hell, if you got a problem with a midget, call me. I’ll help you. Me and you can whup the hell out of him.”
He asks us what we should do if we see two inmates stabbing each other.
“I’d probably call somebody,” a cadet offers.
“I’d sit there and holler ‘stop,’ ” says a veteran guard.
Mr. Tucker points at her. “Damn right. That’s it. If they don’t pay attention to you, hey, there ain’t nothing else you can do.”