Christian Parenti is an American investigative journalist who has written extensively about the United States prison industry. In recent years, Parenti has also spent time in Afghanistan and Iraq chronicling the US presence in those countries.

Parenti is correspondent for The Nation and his writing has appeared in many other publications. He is currently visiting fellow at CUNY's Center for Place, Culture and Politics.

Parenti is the author of several books. Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (2000) is a survey of the rise of the prison industrial complex from the Nixon through Reagan eras and into the present. The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror (2003) is a study of surveillance and control in modern society. His most recent book, The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (2004), is a collection of dispatches from in and around Baghdad during the US occupation.

Parenti was particularly critical of the 2004 Afghan presidential election, observing that many people in Afghanistan were in possession of three or four photographic ID cards. He himself, not an Afghan citizen, could have easily voted. "One of the parties gave me two valid voting cards," he wrote, "that I could add my photograph to and I could have voted if I wanted to." [1]

References

• Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (1999) ISBN 1859843034
• The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror (2003) ISBN 1859847188
• The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (2004) ISBN 1565849485

External links

• List of articles from The Nation
• Index of articles by by Christian Parenti
• "Christian Parenti in Afghanistan: Saturday's Elections Were A 'Farce'" interview with Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!, October 12th, 2004)
• "Back to the Motherland: Cuba in Africa" (Monthly Review, June 2003)