Meanwhile, I explored my “prison.” There was an encyclopedia on the shelves—there really were all kinds of books, from high literature to murder mysteries—and on impulse I looked up prison. That got me onto a series of interconnected articles on incarceration. I saw some photos of prisoners in their prison uniforms, and found their virile toughness rather attractive. I also thought I saw something else in those images, something that left me feeling disturbed.
After pondering what this might be, I came up with the sense that there was something broken or ruptured in these men. It wasn’t their will, they were all pretty defiant. It was, I thought, a kind of broken moral restraint, a ripping of the ordinary social covenant. And I had the sense that they felt very strongly their being on the
