In a Victorian Prison

‘The god of criminals is their belly’: diet, prisoner health, and prison medical officers in mid-nineteenth-century English and Irish prisons

“…Dietaries, devised in the 1860s and the 1870s, tended to be assessed as being 'more or less generous' than Graham's scale. 92 Graham had warned that the diets were not to be made an instrument of punishment, and in evidence to the 1864 inquiry into the diets of convict prisons, Milner, reflecting on the experiences of Millbank in 1822, Wakefield in 1849, and a more recent reduction in 1862-63 in the dietary of prisoners at Wakefield, cautioned against reductions in the dietary that were being trialled at Pentonville. 93 However, as Priestley has shown, many prisoners believed the diets were adjusted to test the limits of their well-being.…”

“…93 However, as Priestley has shown, many prisoners believed the diets were adjusted to test the limits of their well-being. 94 Their memoirs testify to how acutely aware they were of the impact of prison diet on health, and many inmates noted how they rapidly lost weight and tone in prison, vividly recording the anxiety that left them unable to eat and the violent digestive disorders and illnesses that they related to poor nutrition. Jabez Spencer Balfour lost two stone on his admission to Portland Prison, which he attributed to the diet and 'the mental torture I was enduring'.…”

“…96 Poor diet also contributed to the general misery of prison life: 'No other event in the prison day…was so keenly anticipated nor so soon after so often regretted as the arrival of food at the door of the cell.' 97 Amidst demands for greater uniformity in prison discipline and for a more punitive prison regime, witnesses to the 1863 Carnarvon Committee sought reductions to prison dietaries. Concerns about prisoners becoming too enfeebled and physically incapacitated to perform labour and to work on release, and the threat of epidemic disease outbreaks in prisons, however, prompted the Committee to defer proposals for a national, uniform dietary scale for local prisons.…”

Introduction

“…42 For the prisoners, however, 'there was in the first closing of the door behind them, a finality that betokened a dreadful new beginning'. 43 Why the authorities 'should leave a man alone with his thoughts for eight months I cannot possibly conceive', reflected prisoner John Lee of his experiences at the start of his sentence in Pentonville in 1885. 'I can think of nothing more calculated to drive a prisoner mad than eight months of solitude with nothing to think about but his own miseries, with no companion save despair.'…”