1868. ] The Public Health. 131 
and innutritious, and Dr. Lankester pointed out its deficiencies, as 
also that the food was administered to the prisoners only twice a 
day. The great argument employed in favour of the exceedingly 
low dietaries of the Irish prisons is, that if it were better the people 
would commit crimes in order to be taken into prison to get a 
better diet than they could get out. Now the Irish prison dietaries 
cost many of them as little as twopence-halfpenny a day for each 
prisoner and seldom reach the cost of fourpence. If this diet, as is 
stated, is not lower than the diet the people of Ireland get out of 
jail, it reveals a feature in Ireland that is much worse than a defi- 
cient prison dietary, and that is a really starving people. If such 
dietaries as those of the Ivish prisons are fixed at the present low 
nutritive value lest people should be tempted to commit crime to 
partake of them, the Irish destitution must be worse than any thing 
England has ever yet contemplated. The apologists for the low 
diet at the Belfast meeting stated that the majority of prisoners 
were only confined for short periods, and that low diet for a short 
time did no harm. We would call the attention of philanthropists 
to this dangerous doctrine. If men have been living upon so low 
a diet that a little better diet in a prison may tempt them to com- 
mit crime in order to get it, what must be the effect of a low diet 
on such systems but that of lowering them still further, and render- 
ing them unfit for the performance of the work by which they get 
their daily bread? An inducement to the commission of petty 
theft is that feebleness of body which makes work impossible, and 
the object of punishment for such crimes should be the rendering a 
man more able to work than he had been. Besides, these miserably 
low diets depress the powers of the nervous system, and make men 
much more liable to become the prey of despair, and toa tendency to 
commit crime. To withhold from men the means of vicious indul- 
gence in eating and drinking in prison is undoubtedly the duty of 
_ a Government, but to give men a diet that is insufficient to support 
the health of the body is to inflict a punishment that defeats its 
own objects, and frequently leads to the remote consequences of 
disease and death, which the spirit of our criminal law condemns as 
unjust. 
Quite independent of the low dietaries of the Irish prisons is 
the question of the times at which the food is served, the way it is 
cooked, and its quality. From the last report of the Inspector of 
Prisons, there is reason to believe that at least occasionally the food 
is not so good as it ought to be, and that it is not cooked so well, 
nor served so hot as it ought to be; whilst universally the practice 
is to give but two meals a day. Now it ought to be known every- 
where that food served hot goes further than food served cold; and 
that the same quantity of food given three or four times a day 
goes further than when given twice a day. It is often death to old 
K 2 
