The memoir of a former Boston prison librarian has revealed some of the literary preferences of American inmates. And according to Avi Steinberg, aka "Bookie" to the inmates of Suffolk County House of Correction, popular requests are The Diary of Anne Frank, Robert Greene's Machiavellian self-help manual The 48 Laws of Power, and anything by Sylvia Plath.

Steinberg's Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian relates how Steinberg, as a wayward Harvard graduate who had written his thesis on nothing more testing than Bugs Bunny, answered a Craigslist ad and found himself permanently employed working for a prison library in Boston. There he lent books to both men and women inmates, building relationships over the bookstacks.

Steinberg's experiences seem to have made him somewhat wary of the notion that books have the power to transform – not least after the occasion when he was mugged in a park by an ex-con who boasted that he'd still got two overdue titles that Steinberg had issued to him. "Transformation was not necessarily the main story," he reflects. "It happened in some instances but they were notable exceptions. Prisoners weren't there to transform themselves, or be transformed – but they would still come to the library."

The prisoners' book choices are suggestive: Anne Frank was effectively coping with incarceration in her Amsterdam attic, and Plath is an obvious choice for those less than contented with their lot. Participants in Steinberg's women's writing group insisted on checking out an author's photo before they would read the book, with interesting reactions. Flannery O'Connor's portrait got a positive verdict – "She looks kind of busted up, y'know? She ain't too pretty. I trust her" – but the judgment on Gabriel García Márquez was blunt: "That man is a liar".

Erwin James, who has detailed his own experiences of imprisonment in the UK in his journalism and memoirs including A Life Inside, said that strangely enough, inmates like to read prison memoirs. "Despite the high rates of illiteracy – 60% across the board – books about prison are very popular with prisoners, just as films about prison are," he said. "My own books, Jimmy Boyle's diaries, Jeffrey Archer's Prison Diaries – even though everyone is scathing about what he writes – and Jonathan Aitken's Porridge and Passion are all popular. When you are in jail, everyone interprets your experience for you – the media, the politicians – and people want literature that helps them to articulate the experience to themselves."

Crime fiction, particularly Martina Cole's, is also much in demand, James said. "Her books are the most borrowed in prison libraries, and the most stolen, because she writes her crime fiction from the point of view of the criminals and their families." True crime, such as books about the Krays, also goes down well, though James says he fears the distorting effects on young criminals of titles that glamorise violence. Inmates also love history, he said, and romance: "Anything that brings some colour into their lives."

Despite daily requests, Steinberg's library refused to lend prisoners copies of The 48 Laws of Power, the book about survival skills reportedly beloved of some of America's top rappers – perhaps unsurprisingly for a manual which counsels you to "conceal your intentions" and "discover each man's thumbscrew."

But James has no truck with such controls. "To my mind banning any literature is pointless," he said. "People will only read it when they come out."