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Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons is a book that makes a number of interesting, original points. The author comes to us with highest credentials. She is a professor of law at Emory University; she has earned a Ph.D. from Columbia and a law degree from Yale Law School and has studied at the Psychoanalytic Institute at New York University Medical Center. She writes from her experiences with prisoners and an extensive survey of the literature.
This is a book about paradoxes and mingled yarns—about the bright sides of dark events, the silver linings of sable clouds. The book portrays law-abiding citizens who harbor a “strange liking” for criminal deeds, and criminals who find an “extraordinary beauty” in their prison yards. Thus, the book describes a nonutopian world in which criminals and noncriminals…live together in a symbiotic as well as an adversarial relationship, needing each other, serving each other, living for as well as off each other, enriching each other's lives in profound and surprising ways. (p. ix)
Part One deals with “Beloved Prisons” and why some inmates find incarceration valuable. According to Duncan, many think of prison as a refuge from the prosaic. For example, the hero in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle exclaims, “Thank God for prison! It gave me the chance to think” (p. 14). Similarly, Robert Jay Lifton says that, in the experience of disillusion and renewal that follows incarceration, “men and women gained access to parts of themselves they had never known existed” (pp. 10-11). In like fashion, Edith Jacobson found that in intelligent persons, prison often set off constructive development, such as creative writing, art, or the study of science, history, or languages (p. 19). Duncan also quotes the anthropologist Robert Brain to the effect that the immobilization of prisoners fosters lasting friendships characterized by affection and trust (p. 19). Likewise, in Prisoner of Mao, Bao Ruo-Wang says, “It is in the prisons and camps that the