📚 Prisons

Locking up as policy: the penitentiary’s founders, the prison letters, and the reporting that never stopped.

Below are the 23 works carrying the subject prisons in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	... Trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen	Viktor Emil Frankl	1946	111
	De profundis	Oscar Wilde	1905	74
	The Great Escape (Bull's-eye S.)	Paul Brickhill	1950	34
	Soledad Brother	George L. Jackson	1970	28
	Gulag	Anne Applebaum	2003	22
	A Prison Diary	Jeffrey Archer	2002	18
	If They Come in the Morning	Angela Y. Davis	1971	15
	Архипелаг ГУЛАГ. T. 5-7	Александр Исаевич Солженицын	1973	15
	After the Madness	Sol Wachtler	1997	14
	Newjack	Ted Conover	2000	13
	The man died	Wole Soyinka	1972	11
	Prisons & prisoners	Constance Georgina Lady Lytton	1914	8
	The society of captives	Gresham M. Sykes	1958	8
	Midnight express	Billy Hayes	1977	8
	A Prison Diary, Volume Three - North Sea Camp	Jeffrey Archer	2004	7
	Midnight Express	Billy Hayes	1977	6
	Are Prisons Obsolete?	Angela Y. Davis	2003	6
	In the belly of the beast	Jack Henry Abbott	1981	5
	Not about nightingales	Tennessee Williams	1998	5
	Imperial reckoning	Caroline Elkins	2004	5
	Men into beasts	George Sylvester Viereck	1952	4
	The Damage Done	Warren Fellows	1997	4
	Fish	T. J. Parsell	2006	3

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 06 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

Nearby shelves

ProbabilityProcrastinationProject ManagementProphetsProtest MovementsProtest Songs

Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.