Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian

I picked up this book after having recognised it from one of the book reviews. So far the book has remained true to its core of documenting the multifarious uses of books in a prison.
Right now the book is running on its fuel of 'vocational thriller' with the prison librarian getting us cozy with the inmates but little forebodes from a well meaning wild specialist in the tone of 'Remember its still a wild animal'. We know the hell is about to break loose only not when.
While reading a 'kite' - note left by an inmate for another in the books - I am wondering if the appropriate permission was taken.
You tune so much into the prison rhythms that his visit to the park describing the outmates seems like too much light on a Plato's person just out of a cave.
On page 158:
"In the meantime, the library continued to play its part revealing prison secrets"
The author musing on the meaning of window watching in prison that lends a birds eye view of the city and the creative writing of his students, become a door into the psychology of the inmates. Watching the drama of a mother-child intraprison stranger-stranger relationship, he jumps into his own life too to take stock of his involvement.
The section that involves the author going into the prison archive and then to the old prison site and relating it to events in sylvia Plath's life reminded me of a book I read on the natural history of Boston. Here his history and obituary background show their mark.
In the beginning, its the Librarian, Library and the Inmates. After the rounds with the author, you go home with a piece of story of each of the inmates with resolution to their dreams or lives.
Keen observations about time to prisoner as water to the ancient mariner, prison (social isolation) in a prison add texture to the perception of life in prison for an outsider.

While reading this book, I came to care enough about the subject that I picked up 'The pattern of Paper Monsters' of a juvenile in prison to compare what I was finding in the current book. The lattern fiction didnt hold me enough, so there goes the comparitive study.