Within Prison Walls being a narrative during a week of voluntary confinement in the state prison at Auburn, New York

"Within Prison Walls" by Thomas Mott Osborne is a first-person account of one man's week spent inside Auburn State Prison, where he sought to understand the experiences of the incarcerated. The narrative follows Osborne as he sheds his known life to become "Thomas Brown," an inmate navigating the harsh routines and human interactions of prison life. His motivations, born from a childhood visit to the same grounds and furthered through work with troubled youth, drove him to seek an intimate understanding to reform. Osborne chronicles his initial reactions to confinement, loneliness, and the strange curiosity that blooms, all while recording his observations in a journal with an authentic lens on the realities of incarceration.