At the time of their arrest in the Middle East, Shane, his girlfriend Sarah Shourd and friend Josh Fattawere were hiking in the Zagros Mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, looking for the Ahmed Awa waterfall, a tourist attraction near the Iraq–Iran border. After they visited the waterfall, the Iranian authorities claimed that they had entered Iran illegally and arrested the three on suspicion of spying. Shourd was released after fourteen months on humanitarian grounds, but Bauer and Fattawere were convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. They spent twenty-six months in captivity and were later released in September 2011 after bail of $500,000 was paid.This experience in a foreign land would leave a profound effect on Bauer and his attitude towards imprisonment, especially when he discovered that prison conditions were sometimes more extreme in his own country. In an article in the magazine Mother Jones1 Bauer wrote, ‘Solitary in Iran nearly broke me. I never thought I’d see worse in American prisons.’ He was determined to reveal the horrors of his homeland’s use of solitary confinement as a form of legalized torture.
