SHAW, George Bernard. The Crime of Imprisonment [Signed Edition]

SHAW, George Bernard. The Crime of Imprisonment. Frontispiece caricature of Shaw and fifteen illustrations by William Gropper. New York: Published by Philosophical Library, 1946. Large post octavo. First edition. pp. 125. Quarter red buckram on black papered boards. Signed by the author on front endpaper. In frayed pictorial dust jacket. A very good to fine copy. Shaw's famous treatise on imprisonment written, prepared on behalf of the British Labor Research Office and originally published as an essay preface to Lord Oliver's report on English & American prison conditions."When I was a boy in my teens in Dublin I was asked by an acquaintance of mine who was clerk to a Crown Solicitor, and had business in prisons, whether I would like to go to Mountjoy Prison, much as he might have asked me whether I would like to go through the Mint, or the cellars of the docks ... My main impression of the others [prisoners], and the one that has stuck longest and hardest, was that as it was evidently impossible to reform such men, it was useless to torture them, and dangerous to release them."