Concern that prison food needed to be nutritious began in England in the 1840s as prisons began to nationalize. While England would not have a national system of prisons in place until the 1870s, prison reformers and government officials began to pay attention to conditions in prisons much earlier in the century.
Early English prison diets were adequate and not intended to be punitive. They included two pounds of bread per day in British prisons (and, for prisoners incarcerated for longer than 6 months, a small ration of low-alcohol beer). Complimenting the bread were cheese, suet and small quantities of onions. Over the course of the 19th Century these conditions declined, the second half of the Victorian Era (roughly 1870-1900) was a low point for prisoners as prison reformers made prison life more punitive. A policy called “hard bed, hard board, hard labour” sought to make prisoners less comfortable by taking away beds, insisting that all able bodied prisoners do some form of work, and by serving nutritious but specifically untasty food. This same policy limited prisoners from receiving small stipends from friends and family on the outside to purchase non-essentials from jailers, like soap and better food. This move was intended to make jailers less corrupt, but it also curtailed one of the only outlets through which prisoners had been able some small level of control over the quality of their life, including their diet.
While the main purpose of these reforms was to create a more austere prison culture, the architects of these reforms often appealed to governments and the public by explaining that these moves were economically frugal and scientifically warranted. In the words of the contemporary prison administrator Edmund DuCane, who helped pass the prison reform bill of 1877: ” there is now one diet for the prisons of the whole of England and Wales, that it is believed to be a better diet than the generality of those formerly in use, and that from this and other causes the health of the prisons is certainly high, but that from careful study of the ingredients, the cost of food for prisoners is now less than it used to be.” in these words, DuCane was echoing and re-popularizing 18th Century prison reformers like Jonas Hanway, who wrote in 1776 that “solitude in imprisonment, with proper profitable labor and a spare diet” were the essential elements that would allow prisoners to reflect on their crimes and ultimately repent of their criminal actions.
DuCane was a relative humanitarian in the history of prison reform, but his writings are foundational for a scientific system of prison management that carefully balanced humane treatment with complete, austere control over the prisonser’s environment. The ideal prison, according to DuCane’s views should mete out just enough misery to be considered punitive, but not enough to be considered truly abusive. This balancing act continues today in American prisons.
The next installment will discuss food and life in American prisons, which began to diverge from their British role models in the late 19th Century