In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

Outside the nine cells[16] of our ward runs a corridor which is left open part of the day, and through its barred windows I can see the country. Right under my eye is the mellow muddy river that Theodore Dreiser's brother sang, long ago. On the banks of the Wabash I see a huge pile of discarded cars, rust-rotted fragments of machines, shanties paintless and broken-roofed, the homes of human discards among the industrial refuse. This view outside the jail makes me feel at home in the jail. The bars shut me into, rather than out of, a familiar world.

The men in the ward enhance my feeling of having come more close to the America that put me here. There are details, of course, inanimate or crawling, to which I am not used; but like the iron-barred windows, the grated doors, these separating elements are superficial; they do not avail against the growing knowledge that to be in this jail, among these men, and with the police and the chamber of commerce outside, is to be at the heart of a common experience and (given the society we live in) to be in the right place.