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 chronicling "the hotspots of US empire": Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, and Bolivia. He is the son of noted Marxist scholar Michael Parenti. A journalist is a person who practices journalism, the gathering and dissemination of information about current events, trends, issues and people. ... Dr. Michael Parenti (born 1933) is an American political scientist and historian. ...

Parenti's work is usually published in The Nation and he frequently appears on Doug Henwood's radio show "Behind The News" to discuss it. He has also written for many other publications, including In These Times. He is currently visiting fellow at CUNY's Center for Place, Culture and Politics. The Nation is a weekly leftist periodical devoted to politics and culture. ... Doug Henwood (born December 7, 1952) is an American journalist who writes frequently about economic affairs. ... In These Times is a biweekly magazine of news and opinion published in Chicago. ... The City University of New York (CUNY; acronym usually pronounced kyoo-nee or coo-nee), located in New York City, is the largest urban university in the United States, with more than 208,000 enrolled in degree programs and another 208,000 enrolled in adult and continuing education courses at...

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. A street map of Baghdad Average temperature (red) and precipitations (blue) in Baghdad *See Bagdad, Tasmania for the Australian town of a similar name. ...

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] An election to the office of President of Afghanistan was held on October 9, 2004. ...

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)
• Audio and transcript of a Christian Parenti speech on the Prison Industrial Complex