The fire-place is small and inconvenient, and very scantily supplied with fuel, and when the prison is crowded, as it has lately been, it is totally impossible for all the prisoners to have access to the fire, for the required purposes of cooking or otherwise particularly when most required, as in wet and inclement weather.
It sometimes happens that thirteen or more prisoners are obliged to sleep in the said kitchen, and three in each bed in many of the cells.
To each cell is affixed an iron-grating door, and also a door made of timber; and the debtors are locked up within their respective cells at nine o’clock in the evening, having no access to them till seven o’clock the next morning, so that any one being taken ill in the night might lay and perish before his situation could be discovered or made known, or any assistance rendered.
The prisoners are unlocked at seven o’clock in the morning, and are allowed to go into the yard of the prison till eight, when they are called in by means of a whistle until nine o’clock, and allowed to remain in the yard again until twelve o’clock at noon, again locked into the wards till one o’clock, and again in the same manner at five o’clock in the afternoon for the night.
Respectable females are confined in the same ward with the smugglers and others, and no female is appointed or employed to attend on them in any case.
The state of the prison is in general filthy.
There is no sink or water-course, nor any water laid on to either of the wards, nor any means of obtaining water after five o’clock in the evening.
If any part or the whole of the prison is at any time cleaned, it is done by some of the debtors.
There is no proper place for the reception of the dirty water or filth from the wards, but the same is indiscriminately thrown out at the iron-grating doors at the end of the passage to each ward, thereby occasioning a great stench highly disagreeable and unwholesome to the prisoners.
The prisoners are not allowed to see their respective friends or solicitors within the walls of the prison, but are compelled to come into a room in the gaoler’s house, and there meet their friends or solicitors, subject to the continual interruption or presence of the gaoler, his wife, or others, to the great annoyance of the prisoners and their friends, and on the sabbath-day even this privilege is not allowed.