Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s great work, Cancer Ward, features a hospital ward where the patients suffer indignities and restrictions. Slowly the author pulls back and you see the world outside the ward too and realise what’s in the ward is a microcosm of what is outside. This book starts with an archaeological dig at a now closed boys’ reform school.

https://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Boys-Novel-Colson-Whitehead/dp/0385537077