“Air.—And as to air, which is no less necessary than the two preceding articles, and given us by Providence quite gratis, without any care or labour of our own; yet, as if the bounteous goodness of heaven excited our envy, methods are contrived to rob prisoners of this genuine cordial of life, as Dr. Hales very properly calls it; I mean by preventing that circulation and change of the fluid without which animals cannot live and thrive. It is well known that air which has performed its office in the lungs is feculent and noxious. Writers upon this subject show that a hogshead of air will last a man only an hour: but those who do not choose to consult philosophers may judge from a notorious fact. In 1756, at Calcutta, in Bengal, out of 170 persons who were confined in a hole there one night, 154 were taken out dead. The few survivors ascribed the mortality to their want of fresh air; and called the place, Hell in Miniature.
“From hence any one may judge of the probability there is against health and life of prisoners crowded in their rooms, cells, and subterraneous dungeons, for 14 or 15 hours out of the 24. In some of those caverns the floor is very damp; in some there is sometimes an inch or two of water; and the straw or bedding is laid on such floors, seldom on barrack bedsteads. Where prisoners are not kept in underground cells, they are often confined in their rooms, because there is no court belonging to the prisons; which is the case in many city and town gaols; because the walls round the yard are ruinous, or are too low[[32]] for safety; or because the gaoler has the ground for his own use. Prisoners confined in this manner are generally unhealthy.
“In Baker’s Chronicle, p. 353, that historian, mentioning the assize held in Oxford Castle, 1577 (called, from its fatal consequences, the Black Assize), informs us, ‘that all who were present died within forty hours; the lord chief baron, the sheriff, and about 300 more.’ Lord Chancellor Bacon ascribes this to a disease brought into court by the prisoners; and Dr. Mead is of the same opinion.
“The first of these two authors, Lord Bacon, observes, that ‘the most pernicious infection, next the plague, is the smell of a jail, when the prisoners have been long close and nastily kept; whereof we have had, in our time, experience twice or thrice; when both the judges that sat upon the jail, and numbers of those who attended the business, or were present, sickened and died.’
“Sir John Pringle observes that ‘gaols have often been the cause of malignant fevers;’ and he informs us that in the late Rebellion in Scotland, above 200 men of one regiment were infected with the gaol fever by some deserters brought from prisons in England.
“Dr. Lind, physician to the royal hospital at Haslar, near Portsmouth, showed me, in one of the wards, a number of sailors ill of the gaol fever, brought on board their ship by a man who had been discharged from a prison in London. The ship was laid up on the occasion. That gentleman, in his ‘Essay on the Health of Seamen,’ asserts that ‘the source of infection to our armies and fleets are undoubtedly the gaols; we can often trace the importers of it directly from them. It often proves fatal in impressing men on the hasty equipment of a fleet. The first English fleet sent last war to America lost by it above 2000 men. In another place he assures us that the seeds of infection were carried from the guard-ships into our squadrons; and the mortality thus occasioned was greater than by all other diseases or means of death put together.’
“It were easy to multiply instances of this mischief; but those I have mentioned are, I presume, sufficient to show, even if no mercy were due to prisoners, that the gaol distemper is a ‘national concern’ of no small importance.”
“Sewers.—Some gaols have no sewers or vaults; and in those that have, if they be not properly attended to, they are, even to a visitant, offensive beyond description; how noxious, then, to people confined constantly in those prisons!
“One cause why the rooms in some prisons are so close is the window-tax, which the gaolers have to pay; this tempts them to stop the windows and stifle their prisoners.
“Bedding.—In many gaols, and in most bridewells, there is no allowance of bedding or straw for prisoners to sleep on; and if by any means they get a little, it is not changed for months together, so that it is offensive and almost worn to dust. Some lie upon rags, others upon bare floors. When I have complained of this to the keepers, their justification has been: ‘the county allows no straw; the prisoners have none but at my cost.’”