RALEIGH - Literary legend has it that Ralph Waldo Emerson came to see Henry David Thoreau when Thoreau was serving time for tax evasion.

"Henry!" said Emerson, peeking between the bars, "what are you doing in there?"

Thoreau famously replied, "Waldo, the question is, what are you doing out there?"

Thoreau meant that when laws are unjust, conscientious people should feel comfortable in captivity. He immortalized his views in "Civil Disobedience," an essay that coined a phrase and shook the world.

His words helped Gandhi throw the British out of India. They led Martin Luther King Jr. to write "Letter from Birmingham Jail" more than a century later. Protesters used "Civil Disobedience" in pressuring President Nixon to end the Vietnam War.

Later this month marks the anniversary of Thoreau's one night in jail. His stint in the stir was cut short when a veiled woman, probably his aunt, paid his taxes and got the charges dropped. (His mother is alleged to have slipped him cookies during his brief incarceration.)

Thoreau didn't actually write "Civil Disobedience" in jail. Plenty of good books have been composed in the hoosegow, however, and jail is a great place to curl up and give them the time they deserve.

That's what I learned last fall while serving 30 days in the Wake County lockup. (Thoreau went to jail out of principle; I went because I did something stupid and immoral: I drove an automobile while intoxicated, and not for the first time. I now abstain from alcohol.)

Late one night after lights out, I dog-eared the page I was reading in a collection of short stories by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. When I looked up from my pillow, I saw a surprising sight.

There on the next bunk, Nate (counterfeiting) was reading "Inca Gold" by Clive Cussler. That in itself was unremarkable. But in the bunk beside him, Mack (drug trafficking) was reading "Tai-Pan," the James Clavell opium epic.

And next to him, a first-time bank robber we had nicknamed Willie Wonka was reading a copy of National Geographic. Outlaw (parole violation) was perusing the Quran, and Luther (armed robbery), a young Muslim convert, was making notes in the margins of the King James Bible.

Lights out, TV off

As I would learn, men reading books in bed is not an uncommon sight in jail. During the day you play dominoes, chess, Scrabble and hearts. You watch Oprah, Jerry Springer, Maury Povich and "Friday Night SmackDown."

You do push-ups, pull-ups and sit-ups and battle your fellow incarcerees in game after game of orange-ball (orange-ball is volleyball without a net, using a pair of orange uniform socks as a ball, one sock stuffed inside the other).

But after lights out -- which really means "television off" -- you catch up on your reading. Adult male readers are a dying breed in America, according to more than one recent study. Not true in the Wake County detention system.

Here's the thing: Most guys don't know they're going to jail, so they don't have a chance to plan ahead. They must content themselves with books chosen by the sheriff.

And while the scene I described above is accurate in its depiction of voracious reading, it is not a clear snapshot of the selections chosen for the sheriff's book club.

Each week, a detention officer opens the door of the cellblock and leaves a box of books there for an hour or so while inmates pick and paw through them and plan what to read in the coming days.

This scene repeats itself on every "pod" in the Wake County Public Safety Center downtown and the Jail Annex on Hammond Road, as well as the Detention Center across the street.

Aside from the weekly canteen, the book cart represents life's most important drama for Wake County's inmates -- 1,173 men and 137 women as of Monday.

Take a guess at the type of book that dominates the book cart. Science fiction? Poetry? Inspirational tales and religious texts? No. Not even crime novels.

Half the books on the cart are just like half the books published and purchased on planet Earth. They definitely qualify as "escapist literature," but they do not include "The Great Escape" by Paul Brickhill or "Papillon" by Henri Charrière.

They're romance novels.

That's right. The street-wise inmates of the Wake County jail are offered mostly "A Knight in Shining Armor" by Jude Deveraux and "Mr. Perfect" by Linda Howard, "Ravished" by Amanda Quick and "Carnal Innocence" by Nora Roberts and "Lord of Scoundrels" by Loretta Chase. (I myself enjoyed "Son of the Morning" and "Duncan's Bride," both by Linda Howard, plus "Sleeping Beauty" by Judith Ivory and "Family Man" by Jayne Ann Krentz.)

How is this possible?

Where books come from

All sorts of people drop off books at the jail, says Phyllis Stephens, spokeswoman for the sheriff. The biggest donor is the public library. When the library conducts its fall book sale, it invites detention chief Frank Gunter to come over and cherry-pick before the crowds descend.

"He tries very hard to select a wide variety of books," Stephens notes. Lately Gunter has been on a mission to increase the number of Spanish-language books, because 10 percent to 15 percent of inmates are Hispanic. Gunter does not have a fondness for romance novels, Stephens says.

So it must be regular citizens who are making the donations. Not surprising, when you think about it: Wake County is in the South, where people read more romances than in any other region of the United States.

What, I wondered, does Stephens think the effect might be on inmates from weeks or even months of romance-novel reading? Romance is a form of love, and love could be a deterrent to criminal behavior and recidivism.

On the other hand, parts of every romance novel, even the lousy ones, are meant to be racy. They're arousing. Does the sheriff really want a bunch of worked-up inmates in his jail?

"I try to avoid answering tongue-in-cheek questions," Stephens says. "So I think I'll leave that speculation up to you."

A last word on Thoreau the jailbird: He was falsely arrested and illegally imprisoned. A scholar in the '70s found that the Massachusetts law on the books in 1846 says a person who refuses to pay his taxes should suffer seizure and sale of his possessions, not arrest and incarceration, not even one night in jail.

Thoreau sought a simple life. He owned almost nothing. The cabin he built on Walden Pond, about a mile and a half from the village of Concord, Mass., was valued at $8, little more than the $1.50 poll tax he believed contributed to slavery and the Mexican-American War.

But Thoreau did have something the tax collector might have seized: a collection of books. One hundred forty of them.

Six months after I'd gotten out of jail, I ran into Nate. He said he had given up counterfeiting and started a pressure-washing business. He'd grown his hair out and gotten back with his girlfriend. He looked great. The next night I wrote him and asked if he'd read any books since we were bunkmates.

"Sadly, no," he wrote back.

"Me neither," I confessed.

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