Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

United Nations (UN)

  United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA)

  University of Chicago

  untouchables

  UPS

  USA Today

  U.S. Chamber of Commerce

  U.S. Chemical Safety Board

  U.S. Customs and Border Protection

  U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)

  U.S. Geological Survey

  U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS)

  Valdes, Frank

  Vargas, Tony

  veterans; recognition of service of; retreat for; wives of

  Veterans for Peace

  Vietnam veterans; prisoners of war and; in rap groups

  Vietnam Veterans Against the War

  Vietnam War; opposition to

  virtuous consumption

  “voice”

  voting

  Walker, Matthew

  Wall Shadows (Tannenbaum)

  Walmart

  Warren, Wilson J.

  warrior ethic

  wars; drone warfare in, see drone program; “moral sheen” and; protests against; public disengagement from; see also military service

  Washington, Booker T.

  Washington Post, The

  Way of the Knife, The (Mazzetti)

  Weimar, Cheryl

  Weinstein, Harvey

  Weld, Theodore Dwight

  Western, Bruce

  West Point

  Wexford

  What Have We Done (Wood)

  Whole Foods

  Wilkerson, Lawrence

  Williston Basin

  “will to know, the”

  Wood, David

  World War II

  Wright, Lawrence

  Wright-Patterson Air Force Base

  Yemen

  Yeomans, Peter

  Zuboff, Shoshana

  Zucman, Gabriel

  ALSO BY EYAL PRESS

  Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times

  Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict That Divided America

  A Note About the Author

  Eyal Press is an author and a journalist based in New York. The recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, an Andrew Carnegie fellowship, a Cullman Center fellowship at the New York Public Library, and a Puffin Foundation fellowship at Type Media Center, he is a contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and numerous other publications. He is the author of Beautiful Souls and Absolute Convictions. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  PART I: BEHIND THE WALLS

  1. Dual Loyalties

  2. The Other Prisoners

  3. Civilized Punishment

  PART II: BEHIND THE SCREENS

  4. Joystick Warriors

  5. The Other 1 Percent

  PART III: ON THE KILL FLOORS

  6. Shadow People

  7. “Essential Workers”

  PART IV: THE METABOLISM OF THE MODERN WORLD

  8. Dirty Energy

  9. Dirty Tech

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Also by Eyal Press

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  120 Broadway, New York 10271

  Copyright © 2021 by Eyal Press

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2021

  Portions of this book originally appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine.

  Ebook ISBN: 978-0-374-71443-7

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  Some of the names in this book have been changed.

  * Not all COs belonged to the union, because Florida was a right-to-work state.

  * WIC is a supplemental nutrition program for low-income women.

  * Although the term “rural” is often associated with white regions such as Appalachia, Eason found that the southern towns where prisons are concentrated have a higher proportion of Black and Hispanic residents than the areas surrounding them.

  * The age of the victims apparently did not trouble officials like Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who told prosecutors along the border, “We need to take away children.”

  * In 2017 and 2018, Sanderson was the highest-paid CEO in Mississippi, earning more than ten million dollars.

  * On August 3, 2019, an assailant entered a Walmart in the border town of El Paso and murdered twenty-three people, the deadliest attack on Latinos in U.S. history. Law enforcement agents believe that the shooter, Patrick Crusius, posted a white nationalist manifesto on the message board 8chan beforehand, decrying the “Hispanic invasion” of Texas.

  * The measure combined oil and natural gas; in oil alone, America ranked third, behind Russia and Saudi Arabia.