Books: Inside Stuff

MY SIX CONVICTS (369 pp.)—Donald Powell Wilson—Rinehart ($3.50).

Fort Leavenworth in the early '30s was a well-run penitentiary, even if the prisoners seemed to run most of it themselves. Or, certainly, so Psychologist Donald Wilson remembers it from his three-year stint there as an investigator for the U.S. Public Health Service. In those days, Fort Leavenworth was the Government's No. 1 pokey for narcotics-law violators,* and Wilson's job was to study the relationship between drug addiction and crime in general.

Psychologist Wilson got his first shock the first day. He asked the warden for some staff assistants to help administer psychological tests, and...