[1] His books include Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (2000), a survey of the rise of the prison-industrial complex from the Nixon through the Reagan Era and into the present, and The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror (2003), a study of surveillance and control in modern society.

[2] Parenti has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, Bolivia, the Ivory Coast and China, among other locations.

[3] Parenti's reporting in Afghanistan was the subject of an award-winning HBO documentary, Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi.

Directed and edited by Ian Olds, the film follows the working relationship between Parenti and his Afghan colleague Ajmal Naqshbandi, and after Naqshbandi's capture and murder by the Taliban, Parenti's investigation of that crime.

[5] Parenti subsequently taught sustainable development at the SIT Graduate Institute from 2012 to 2014.