Thomas Mott Osborne’s account of his voluntary stay in Auburn State prison. Osborne, the head of a state commission on the prison problem, checked into Auburn to personally experience conditions there. It is really engaging and heartfelt, as well as highly political. Osborne encountered tremendous institutional and political resistance to his reform efforts and you get a real sense of that in this book …

In a review of a biography of Osborne the New York Times had this to say:

Thomas Mott Osborne presents the phenomenon, not rare among men of genius and high talent, where the work of the man surpasses the individual. To no one person is the modem world of prison reform and the whole broad subject of penology so much in debt as to him.

Yet in his own eyes he felt, near the end of his days, that he had lived an ineffectual life. With the shortsightedness of disappointment and despair he could not realize that within ten years of his death biographers would be preoccupied with the ideal of evaluating him as one of the major figures in American reform …