Ruth Hopkins’ book, The Misery Merchants: Life and Death in a Private South African Prison, tells the shocking story of Mangaung Prison. Ruth Hopkins’s brave and extraordinary book, The Misery Merchants: Life and Death in a Private South African Prison is an exposé of Mangaung Prison, a privatised prison, run by G4S, the largest security firm in the world. Hopkins’s story of a broken prison, in which prisoners were forcibly given anti-psychotic drugs and tortured with electric shock ‘therapy’, also details the flow of money in and out of the prison, the links with MPs, and the shocking ‘governance’ of the prison by G4S. An extract has been republished below with permission from the publishers.