In June 2012, Darren Rainey, an inmate in the psychiatric wing of the Dade Correctional Institution in Florida, was intentionally scalded with 180-degree shower water; he died almost immediately.
Such brutality, it turned out, was not at all unusual at this prison facility, which housed a large number of patients who, like Rainey, suffered from schizophrenia, nor was it the only kind of malicious behavior inflicted on its unfortunate residents.
Ordinary press accounts of Rainey’s death provided a neat and self-contained exposé of the evil, sadistic behavior of prison guards. Eyal Press, author Dirty Work (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021), however, is no ordinary journalist; in his deft, empathetic, and nuanced hands, Darren Rainey’s excruciating death becomes a lens through which to examine a far wider social dysfunction. The issues raised by Mr. Press will inevitably affect the wider economy and asset prices.
Start with the housing of a someone suffering from severe schizophrenia in a prison, especially in an economically and institutionally advanced democracy.
This, it turns out, is the simplest part of the story. During the first half of the twentieth century, states gradually closed their medieval mental hospitals, and in 1963 John Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act, which established 1,500 community centers to care for the mentally ill. In the gradual retreat from social welfare activism in the 1970s, funding slowly dried up, a process that accelerated under Ronald Reagan’s austerity measures; in the 1980s, the vanguard of today’s masses of the mentally ill homeless began to populate American streets, exacerbated in the past decade by spiralling rents; in the words of one observer, “No other affluent country has abandoned its mentally ill to this extent.” By default, police became the nation’s provider of emergency psychiatric care, and its prisons, its psychiatric institutions.
Most of us rarely, if ever, come near a prison, and with good reason. They’re brutal places, and thus get hidden away in poor, isolated, and sparsely populated locales possessing little else in the way of economic opportunity. Not infrequently, they’re the only source of secure, decently paying jobs that offer pension benefits and healthcare coverage to an economically depressed area’s undereducated and under-trained workforce. The prison guard or psychiatric technician who objects to rampant cruelty risks, at a minimum, their employment; if they speak out, rent and grocery money vanish.
Nor is that all; Mr. Press describes the heart-breaking case of a psychiatric worker named Harriet Krzykowski who, after inquiring too closely about Darren Rainey’s death, found that the guards assigned to protect her had disappeared. She spiralled into depression and ill health from the psychological stress of betraying her humanity on a daily basis. It was no coincidence that the psychotherapist who finally blew the whistle on the Rainey case, George Mallinckrodt, hailed from a wealthy family and could afford to quit.
Mr. Press describes Ms. Krzykowski’s condition as “moral injury,” and it’s hardly unique to the prison industry, whose guards suffer from excessive suicide rates. (One New Jersey study found a mean guard life expectancy of 58 years.) The author finds moral injury everywhere there is “dirty work,” essential jobs that the rest of us don’t want to be reminded of. He spends, for example, a chapter on drone operators whose video technology allows them to get up close and personal daily with the death and destruction they visit from thousands of miles away, frequently involving the deaths of innocent men, women, and children. In the most poignant heartbreaking episode in a book packed with them, one drone operator watched in horror as a small boy tries to reassemble the scattered remains of his dead father. One can only imagine the psychological toll taken by a career filled by such images.
But by far, the book’s most disturbing section deals with meat and poultry workers on massive animal “disassembly” lines, where the chain of brutality runs from corporate executives enslaved to quarterly profit margins to ruthless overseers who drive line workers who must kill, gut, and process a chicken per minute over eight- to 12-hour shifts and wear adult diapers because of forbidden bathroom breaks. Mr. Press is typically empathetic to the dramatis personae in the horrors of the modern industrial protein chain, save for one: Eugene Scalia, the son of the late supreme court justice and recent Secretary of Labor, who has made a revolving door career of dismantling worker protections, both as a government official and lobbyist for the meat industry. To Mr. Scalia, the smooth-handed product of Wharton and the University of Chicago Law School, repetitive strain injury is junk science, and the arthritis, spine injuries, lacerations, and skin conditions endemic among poultry workers are a figment of their and their physicians’ imaginations.
When, in early 2020, meat and poultry plant workers, forced to continue working in crowded conditions and denied face masks, began dying, the head of Tyson Foods, John Tyson, took out a full-page ad in The New York Times which warned, “The food supply chain is breaking. As pork, beef, and chicken plants are being forced to close, even for short periods of time, millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the food chain.” Meanwhile, the president invoked the Defense Production Act to reopen meat plants closed by local health authorities. It was not enough that hundreds of food plant workers had to die so that Americans could continue to eat cheap meat, but also so that Tyson could ship millions of pounds of chicken to China. (Excess mortality statistics in communities hosting plants suggest that the meat-packing death toll runs into the thousands.)
The federal agency tasked with protecting the health of workers, OSHA, almost completely ignored slaughterhouse workplace violations; in one of the few cases where it took action, a Smithfield pork slaughterhouse in South Dakota where 1,200 workers got sick and four died, it fined the facility all of $13,494. That most of these workers were immigrants made them all the more invisible; when in August 2020 President Trump appeared with postal workers, nurses, and a truck driver, with nary a slaughterhouse employee was in sight.
Dirty work, by its very nature, is simultaneously everywhere and, by design, invisible, from our dinner plates to our cell phones. The more aware of it we are, the better chance we have of preserving our way of life, and likely, in the end, our portfolios as well. Mr. Press is a truly gifted journalist and prose craftsman; Dirty Work compels and outrages in the same way as Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (the latter also about the meatpacking industry.)
Tarbell’s book brought about the breakup of Rockefeller’s behemoth; more relevantly, The Jungle almost single-handedly midwifed the FDA. This, of course, was not Sinclair’s primary goal, which was to highlight the plight of meatpacking workers, causing him to lament, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” With his sharp prose, Mr. Press strikes both.
William J. Bernstein is a neurologist, co-founder of Efficient Frontier Advisors, an investment management firm, and has written several titles on finance and economic history. He has contributed to the peer-reviewed finance literature and has written for several national publications, including Money Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. He has produced several finance titles, and four volumes of history, The Birth of Plenty, A Splendid Exchange, Masters of the Word, and The Delusions of Crowds about, respectively, the economic growth inflection of the early 19th century, the history of world trade, the effects of access to technology on human relations and politics, and financial and religious mass manias. He was also the 2017 winner of the James R. Vertin Award from CFA Institute.
In June 2012, Darren Rainey, an inmate in the psychiatric wing of the Dade Correctional Institution in Florida, was intentionally scalded with 180-degree shower water; he died almost immediately.