Will I love The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, With Preliminary Observations, and an Account of Some Foreign Prisons. By John Howard, F.R.S?

John Howard was the first hero of prison reform. Though born to a life of ease, he risked–and ultimately lost–his life by inspecting prisons throughout Britain at a time when “jail fever,” a form of typhus, killed many of those imprisoned.

Howard’s damning findings of filthy dungeons and corrupt jailers, all chronicled in this book, sparked a reform movement that reached the highest levels of government and endured for a generation.