Within Prison Walls...

The freshman reading book this year will be the popular Orange Is the New Black, a memoir of time in a federal prison. For an earlier memoir of prison life, try Within prison walls : being a narrative of personal experience during a week of voluntary confinement in the state prison at Auburn, New York by Thomas Osborne.

 He was a reformer who voluntarily posed as a prisoner and spent a week in the Auburn prison in 1913 to see first hand what it was like. He later was warden of Sing Sing, and his voice helped end the cruelties of flogging and rules of silence then common in prisons.

You can find these books and many more about prisons, criminal justice and so forth by visiting our library page, or asking one of us for help.