Books with author Thomas Mott Osborne

“Thomas Mott Osborne investigated the conditions inside the prison and wrote a scathing study of its effects.” -Janet Miron, ‘Prisons, Asylums, and the Public: Institutional Visiting in the Nineteenth Century’, University of Toronto Press, 2011 BEING A NARRATIVE OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE DURING A WEEK OF VOLUNTARY CONFINEMENT IN THE STATE PRISON AT AUBURN, NEW YORK “Thomas Mott Osborne…decided to test the system for himself, by serving voluntarily as a prisoner for a week in the Auburn Prison. This book, consisting partly of notes written from day to day during his confinement, and partly of subsequent comments and additions, is the result. It tells vividly and without reticence all that he did, saw and heard. At times, it reaches a high pitch of dramatic expression – not through any conscious effort of the author’s, but just because he describes simply what he felt and beheld. His chapter ‘A Night in Hell,’ describing the horrors of solitary confinement, should rouse the conscience of every reader to protest against the perpetuation of such barbarities. His report as a whole reveals not only grave defects in administering the penal system, but even more in the system itself. Mr. Osborne’s book surpasses in interest the sensational novel – because it is true. One very important feature in it is the revelation it gives of his ability to get the sympathy of the prisoners, and so to understand them. Without such understanding, which involves the acknowledgement that they are human beings, subject to similar passions and amendable to similar incentives as their fellows, our prisons will continue to be haunts of legalized inhumanity, in which, as Mr. Osborne remarks, the souls and bodies of their inmates are destroyed by a deliberate regimen.” -The Harvard Graduates' Magazine, Volume 23, 1914-1915 "His career as a penologist was short, but in the interval of the few years he served he succeeded in revolutionizing American prison reform, if not always in fact, then in awakening responsibility.... He was made of the spectacular stuff of martyrs, to many people perhaps ridiculous, but to those whose lives his theories most closely touched, inspiring and often godlike." -The New York Times CONTENTS I. WHY I WENT TO PRISON II. SUNDAY'S JOURNAL III. MONDAY MORNING IV. MONDAY AFTERNOON V. THE FIRST NIGHT VI. TUESDAY MORNING VII. TUESDAY AFTERNOON AND EVENING VIII. WEDNESDAY MORNING AND AFTERNOON IX. WEDNESDAY EVENING X. THURSDAY XI. FRIDAY XII. SATURDAY XIII. A NIGHT IN HELL XIV. SUNDAY--THE END XV. CUI BONO?

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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 . . .

Excerpt from Within Prison Walls: Being a Narrative of Personal, Experience During a Confinement of Voluntary Confinement in the State Prison York Auburn, New YorkThe account in the following chapters of my week in Auburn Prison is taken from the pages of a journal I kept during my confinement. In that I jotted down, day by day, every incident no mat ter how trivial it seemed at the time; so that I possess a very complete record of my week in prison.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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