https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/01/judge-orders-rightwing-extremist-to-read-classic-literature-or-face-prison
While being 'sentenced to literature' seems on the surface to be a 'good thing', in that you get to read loads of stuff and have a literary critical chin wag with the judge about it afterwards, I'm not so sure about this particular example.
For one, the authors listed (excepting Shakespeare) all belong to one fictional tradition, i.e. the C19th English realist novel (I doubt the judge knows that Hardy was, in his last 30 or so years, exclusively a poet); this suggests the narrowness of the judge's own literary touchstones.
For another, it assumes that (a particular kind of) literature merely by virtue of being read has a 'civilising' function. If this were true then Great Expectations would have stopped that schoolboy drop-kicking that cat when I was at Astor all those years ago.
But given that Mr. John's obliged to serve his time in paperback purgatory, I'd advise him to take a wild, indiscriminate and sleep-deprived literary ride over the next 5 months, taking in everything from apocalyptic sf to weird fiction, and everyone from Alain-Fournier to Zamyatin, then show up the judge for the parochial plumpster that he is.
Should the tactic fail, he'll only get more reading time in the slammer anyway. What larks!