“The necessary reforms are very simple.  They concern the needs of the body and the needs of the mind of each unfortunate prisoner.

“With regard to the first, there are three permanent punishments authorised by law in English prisons: 

“1.  Hunger.

“2.  Insomnia.

“3.  Disease.

“The food supplied to prisoners is entirely inadequate.  Most of it is revolting in character.  All of it is insufficient.  Every prisoner suffers day and night from hunger....

“The result of the food—­which in most cases consists of weak gruel, badly baked bread, suet and water—­is disease in the form of incessant diarrhoea.  This malady, which ultimately with most prisoners becomes a permanent disease, is a recognised institution in every prison.  At Wandsworth Prison, for instance—­where I was confined for two months, till I had to be carried into hospital, where I remained for another two months—­the warders go round twice or three times a day with astringent medicine, which they serve out to the prisoners as a matter of course.  After about a week of such treatment it is unnecessary to say that the medicine produces no effect at all.

“The wretched prisoner is thus left a prey to the most weakening, depressing and humiliating malady that can be conceived, and if, as often happens, he fails from physical weakness to complete his required evolutions at the crank, or the mill, he is reported for idleness and punished with the greatest severity and brutality.  Nor is this all.

“Nothing can be worse than the sanitary arrangements of English prisons....  The foul air of the prison cells, increased by a system of ventilation that is utterly ineffective, is so sickening and unwholesome that it is not uncommon for warders, when they come into the room out of the fresh air, and open and inspect each cell, to be violently sick....

“With regard to the punishment of insomnia, it only exists in Chinese and English prisons.  In China it is inflicted by placing the prisoner in a small bamboo cage; in England by means of the plank bed.  The object of the plank bed is to produce insomnia.  There is no other object in it, and it invariably succeeds.  And even when one is subsequently allowed a hard mattress, as happens in the course of imprisonment, one still suffers from insomnia.  It is a revolting and ignorant punishment.

“With regard to the needs of the mind, I beg that you will allow me to say something.

“The present prison system seems almost to have for its aim the wrecking and the destruction of the mental faculties.  The production of insanity is, if not its object, certainly its result.  That is a well-ascertained fact.  Its causes are obvious.  Deprived of books, of all human intercourse, isolated from every humane and humanising influence, condemned to eternal silence, robbed of all intercourse with the external world, treated like an unintelligent animal, brutalised below the level of any of the brute-creation, the wretched man who is confined in an English prison can hardly escape becoming insane.”