Many Mouths

Durbach, Nadja

doi:10.1017/9781108594189

Cited by 10 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 150 publications

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“…In each of the above cases, however, whether children were fed and what they were given was entirely dependent on the goodwill of local officials who rarely applied any scientific principles to their provisioning practices. 13 The strategic feeding of juvenile-adults was part of this trend but also represents a significant departure. This brand new and much more contentious category of youth were far from innocent victims, having committed (sometimes many) crimes.…”

Section: National Efficiency and The Next Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Food played a critical role in essentialising differences between gendered bodies and among the bodies of the ethnic groups incarcerated throughout the British Empire. 27 Food was equally important for differentiating among age-based populations: attempts to engineer fitter future citizens meant targeting juvenile-adults, a new prison class, for improved rations.…”

Section: Prison Reform and The Juvenile Dietarymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the 1850s and 1860s, prisoners became unwitting test subjects in scientific experiments regarding the relationship between food and labour, although these had little impact on what inmates were routinely fed. 70 When the 1898 Committee's report raised concerns that the dietary was 'conspicuously insufficient', it made a novel proposal: that attention should be paid not only to the amount of food provided to each inmate, but also to its 'nutritive value'. 71 This suggested that malnutrition rather than merely underfeeding should also be a concern.…”

Section: Experimenting With the Borstal Dietmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Feeding ‘Growing Boys’ and Nourishing ‘Handy English Lads’: British Prison Diets and the Reclamation of the Male Juvenile Offender, 1895–1908

Durbach

2022

Gender & History

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Between 1895 and 1908, Britain's prison administration introduced reforms aimed at 'reclaiming' male adolescent offenders. These included a significant rethinking of the dietary. Drawing on the sciences of nutrition and of adolescent development, the prison experimented with the rations for juvenile-adults, a new category of inmate defined by age and by gender. For the first time, the state explicitly used prison rations in the service of sovereignty: it sought to fashion working-class male adolescents into well-developed specimens of British manhood able to contribute to the increasingly democratic polity and to defend and populate the nation and its empire.In his 1958 memoir Borstal Boy, Irish playwright Brendan Behan recounted his incarceration in England after being arrested at sixteen years of age for involvement with the Irish Republican Army. Transferred out of a men's prison after sentencing to an allocation centre for 'juvenile-adults' bound for borstals -separate prisons for those aged sixteen to twenty-one years -Behan vividly recalled the meal he was provided at intake. We were given 'bloody great plates of stew', he maintained, the portions so large he was unable to manage a second helping. For breakfast, there was 'any amount of bread', three mugs of tea per person and a 'big bloody rissole'. 1 The ample meals Behan consumed during his 1939-1941 incarceration were central to the borstal regimen, which had been developed at the turn of the century to rehabilitate the morals, minds and bodies of young offenders. Although Behan was eventually deported back to Ireland, most of the 'Borstal Boys' he served his sentence alongside were targeted for specialised treatment, including an improved diet, precisely because their age and gender rendered them resources for the nation: as adolescent males, they were on the brink of becoming full British citizens.The borstal was officially added to Britain's 'carceral archipelago' in 1908 but its roots lie in shifts in policies and practices that began in 1895. These stressed the importance of nurture as opposed to nature, rejecting contemporary trends in eugenics and

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Section: National Efficiency and The Next Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Prison Reform and The Juvenile Dietarymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Experimenting With the Borstal Dietmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Feeding ‘Growing Boys’ and Nourishing ‘Handy English Lads’: British Prison Diets and the Reclamation of the Male Juvenile Offender, 1895–1908

Durbach

2022

Gender & History

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

Cox,

Marland

2024

Med. Hist.

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Existing scholarship on prison diets has emphasised the role of food and its restriction as a key aspect of the deterrent system of prison discipline introduced in the 1860s. Here we suggest that a strong emphasis was placed on dietary regulation after the establishment of the reformist, but also ‘testing’, separate system of confinement in the mid-nineteenth century. While the impact of diet on the physical health of prisoners was a major concern, we argue that the psychological impact of food was also stressed, and some prison administrators and doctors argued that diet had an important protective function in preserving inmates’ mental wellbeing. Drawing on a wide range of prison archives and official reports, this article explores the crucial role of prison medical officers in England and Ireland in implementing prison dietaries. It highlights the importance and high level of individual adaptations to dietary scales laid down centrally, as a means of utilising diet as a tool of discipline or as an intervention to improve prisoners’ health. It examines the forays of some prison doctors into dietary experiments, as they investigated the impact of different dietaries or made more quotidian adjustments to food intake, based on local conditions and food supplies. The article concludes that, despite central policies geared to establishing uniformity and interest in new scientific discourses on nutrition, a wide range of practices were pursued in individual prisons, mostly shaped by practical rather than scientific factors, with many prison medical officers asserting their autonomy in making dietary adjustments.

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Keeping Kosher in the Camp: Feeding Interned British Jews during the First World War

Durbach

2020

Immigrants & Minorities

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Many Mouths

Cited by 10 publications

References 150 publications

Feeding ‘Growing Boys’ and Nourishing ‘Handy English Lads’: British Prison Diets and the Reclamation of the Male Juvenile Offender, 1895–1908

Feeding ‘Growing Boys’ and Nourishing ‘Handy English Lads’: British Prison Diets and the Reclamation of the Male Juvenile Offender, 1895–1908

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

Keeping Kosher in the Camp: Feeding Interned British Jews during the First World War

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