The whole body of prison literature that depicts the experience of imprisonment is a major literary precedent.

Among the more modern examples of this literature are Franz Kafka's fictional In the Penal Colony (1919) and Kurt Vonnegut's Jailbird (1976) or the factual "novels" such as Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song (1979) and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1965). Of course one might also think of Harington's Lightning Bug where Latha endures incarceration in the state mental hospital. When she says in regard to a prisoner being moved to the state mental hospital that she has good reason to know that that hospital is not better than the prison, she hints at her own experience there. A reader could also consider novels such as Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with its depiction of life in a state mental hospital as a possible precedent. Importantly, however, for Harington's work...