"Between 1829 and 1831, Jared Curtis, the newly appointed prison chaplain at the Massachusetts State Prison in Charlestown, interviewed every one of the over 300 inmates at the prison and recorded their biographies in two leatherbound notebooks. Those notebooks, fully transcribed and well annotated after their discovery in 1998, form the basis for Philip Gura's Buried from the World: Inside the Massachusetts State Prison, 1829-1831."--BOOK JACKET.