"On a two-mile stretch of land in New York's East River, a 19th-century horror story was unfolding ... Today we call it Roosevelt Island. Then, it was Blackwell's, site of a lunatic asylum, two prisons, an almshouse, and a number of hospitals. Conceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world had ever seen, Blackwell's Island quickly became, in the words of a visiting Charles Dickens, 'a lounging, listless madhouse.' In the first...