‘Food.—There are several bridewells in which prisoners have no allowance of food at all. In some, the keeper farms what little is allowed them; and where he engages to supply each prisoner with one or two pennyworths of bread a-day, I have known this shrunk to half, sometimes less than half the quantity—out of, or broken from, his own loaf. It will perhaps be asked—Does not their work maintain them? The answer to that question, though true, will hardly be believed. There are few bridewells in which any work is done, or can be done. The prisoners have neither tools nor materials of any kind, but spend their time in sloth, profaneness, and debauchery, to a degree which, in some of those houses that I have seen, is extremely shocking.… The same complaint—want of food—is to be found in many county jails. In above half of these debtors have no bread, although it is granted to the highwayman, the housebreaker, and the murderer; and medical assistance, which is provided for the latter, is withheld from the former. In many of these jails, debtors who would work are not permitted to have any tools, lest they should furnish felons with them for escape, or other mischief. I have often seen these prisoners eating their water-soup (bread boiled in mere water), and heard them say, ‘We are locked up, and almost starved to death.’ As to the relief provided for debtors by the benevolent act 32d of George II, I did not find in all England and Wales, except in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey, twelve debtors who had obtained from their creditors the fourpence a-day to which they had a right by that act. The truth is, some debtors are the most pitiable objects in our jails. To their wanting necessary food, I must add not only the demands of jailers, etc., for fees, but also the extortion of bailiffs. These detain in their houses (properly enough denominated spunging-houses), at an enormous expense, prisoners who have money. I know there is a legal provision against this oppression; but the mode of obtaining redress is attended with difficulty, and the abuse continues. The rapine of these extortioners needs some more effectual and easy check: no bailiff should be suffered to keep a public-house.… Felons have in some jails two pennyworth of bread a-day; in some, three halfpennyworth; in some, a pennyworth; in some, none. I often weighed the bread in different prisons, and found the penny loaf seven ounces and a half to eight ounces; the other loaves in proportion. It is probable that, when this allowance was fixed by its value, near double the quantity that the money will now purchase might be bought for it; yet the allowance continues unaltered, and it is not uncommon to see the whole purchase, especially of the smaller sums, eaten at breakfast—which is sometimes the case when they receive their pittance but once in two days; and then on the following day, they must fast. This allowance being so far short of the cravings of nature, and in some prisons lessened by farming to the jailer, many criminals are half-starved; such of them as at their commitment were in health, come out almost famished, scarcely able to move, and for weeks incapable of labor.
‘Water.—Many prisons have no water. This defect is frequent in bridewells and town jails. In the felon’s courts of some county jails there is no water; in some places where there is water, prisoners are always locked up within doors, and have no more than the keeper or his servants think fit to bring them; in one place they were limited to three pints a-day each—a scanty provision for drink and cleanliness.
‘Air.—And as to air, my reader will judge of the malignity of that breathed in prisons, when I assure him that my clothes were, in my first journeys, so offensive, that in a postchaise I could not bear the windows drawn up, and was therefore obliged to travel commonly on horseback. The leaves of my memorandum-book were often so tainted, that I could not use it till after spreading it an hour or two before the fire; and even my antidote—a vial of vinegar—has, after using it in a few prisons, be come intolerably disagreeable. I did not wonder that in those journeys, many jailors made excuses, and did not go with me into the felons’ wards. From hence any one may judge of the probability there is against the health and life of prisoners crowded in close rooms, cells, and subterranean dungeons for fourteen or fifteen hours out of the four-and-twenty. In some of these caverns the floor is very damp; in others there is 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 to their rooms, because there is no court belonging to the prison—which is the case in many city and town jails; or because the walls round the yard are ruinous, or too low for safety; or because the jailor has the ground for his own use. Some jails have no sewers or vaults; and in those that have, if they be not properly attended to, they are, even to a visitor, offensive beyond description. How noxious, therefore, to people constantly confined in those prisons! One cause why the rooms in some prisons are so close, is the window tax, which the jailors have to pay; this tempts them to stop the windows, and stifle the prisoners.
‘Bedding.—In many jails, 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 the bare floors. When I have complained of this to the keepers, the justification has been, The county allows no straw; the prisoners have none but at my cost.
‘Morals.—I have now to complain of what is pernicious to the morals of prisoners; and that is, the confining all sorts of prisoners together—debtors and felons, men and women, the young beginner and the old offender; and with all these, in some counties, such as are guilty of misdemeanors only. In some jails you see—and who can see it without sorrow?—boys of twelve and fourteen eagerly listening to the stories told by practised criminals of their adventures, successes, stratagems, and escapes.
‘Lunatics.—In some few jails are confined idiots and lunatics. These serve for sport to idle visitants at assizes, and at other times of general resort. Many of the bridewells are crowded and offensive, because the rooms which were designed for prisoners are occupied by the insane. When these are not kept separate they disturb and terrify the other prisoners.
‘Jail Fever.—I am ready to think that none who have given credit to what is contained in the foregoing pages, will wonder at the havoc made by the jail fever. From my own observations in 1773, 1774, and 1775, I was fully convinced that many more prisoners were destroyed by it than were put to death by all the public executions in the kingdom.[3] This frequent effect of confinement in prison seems generally understood, and shows how full of emphatical meaning is the curse of a severe creditor, who pronounces his debtor’s doom to rot in jail. I believe I have learnt the full import of this sentence from the vast numbers who, to my certain knowledge, and some of them before my eyes, have perished by the jail fever. But the mischief is not confined to prisons. In Baker’s Chronicle, p. 353, that historian, mentioning the assize held in Oxford in 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 three hundred more’—all being infected by the prisoners who were brought into court. Lord Bacon observes, that ‘the most pernicious infection next the plague, is the smell of a jail when the prisoners have been long, and close, and nastily kept; whereof,’ he says, ‘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.’ At the Lent assize in Taunton, 1730, some prisoners who were brought thither from Ivelchester jail infected the court; and lord chief baron Pengelly, Sir James Sheppard, sergeant, John Pigot, Esq., sheriff, and some hundreds besides, died all of the jail distemper. At Axminster, a little town in Devonshire, a prisoner discharged from Exeter jail in 1755, infected his family with that disease, of which two of them died; and many others in that town afterwards. The numbers that were carried off by the same malady in London in 1750—two judges, the lord mayor, one alderman, and many of inferior rank—are well known. It were easy to multiply instances of the mischief; but those which have been mentioned are, I presume, sufficient to show, even if no mercy were due to prisoners, that the jail distemper is a national concern of no small importance.[4]
‘Vicious examples.—The general prevalence and spread of wickedness in prisons and abroad by discharged prisoners, will now be as easily accounted for as the propagation of disease. It is often said, ‘a prison pays no debts;’ I am sure it may be added, that a prison mends no morals. Sir John Fielding observes, that ‘a criminal discharged, generally by the next session after the execution of his comrades, becomes the head of a gang of his own raising.’ And petty offenders who are committed to bridewell for a year or two, and spend that time, not in hard labor, but in idleness and wicked company, or are sent for that time to county jails, generally grow desperate, and come out fitted for the perpetration of any villainy. Half the robberies in and about London are planned in the prisons, and by that dreadful assemblage of criminals, and the number of idle people who visit them. Multitudes of young creatures, committed for some trifling offense, are totally ruined there. I make no scruple to affirm, that if it were the wish and aim of magistrates to effect the destruction, present and future, of young delinquents, they could not devise a more effectual method than to confine them so long in our prisons, those seats and seminaries of idleness and every vice.
‘These gentlemen who, when they are told of the misery which our prisoners suffer, content themselves with saying, “let them take care to keep out,” prefaced perhaps with an angry prayer, seem not duly sensible of the favor of Providence which distinguishes them from the sufferers. They do not remember that we are required to imitate our gracious Heavenly Parent, who is kind to the unthankful and to the evil; they also forget the vicissitudes of human affairs; the unexpected changes to which all men are liable; and that those whose circumstances are affluent, may in time be reduced to indigence, and become debtors and prisoners. As to criminality, it is possible that a man who has often shuddered at hearing the account of a murder, may, on a sudden temptation, commit that very crime. Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall, and commiserate those that are fallen.’
Such, in an abridged form, is the introductory section of Mr. Howard’s work, entitled ‘A General View of Distress in Prisons;’ but in order fully to appreciate the enormous extent of his labors, it would be necessary to follow him into the remainder of the work, in which he describes and criticises, one by one, the various prisons, both foreign and British, which he had visited during the preceding four years. It is only in this way that one can gain an adequate conception of the misery and wretchedness of the prison system of Great Britain in the latter part of the eighteenth century.