"This terror that seizes and dominates the child, as it seizes the grown
man also, is of course intensified beyond power of expression by the
solitary cellular system of our prisons. Every child is confined to its
cell for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. This is the
appalling thing. To shut up a child in a dimly lit cell for twenty-three
hours out of the twenty-four is an example of the cruelty of stupidity.
If an individual, parent or guardian, did this to a child, he would be
severely punished....

"The second thing from which a child suffers in prison is hunger. The
food that is given to it consists of a piece of usually badly baked
prison bread and a tin of water for breakfast at half past seven. At
twelve o'clock it gets dinner, composed of a tin of coarse Indian meal
stirabout, and at half past five it gets a piece of dry bread and a tin
of water for its supper. This diet in the case of a strong man is always
productive of illness of some kind, chiefly, of course, diarrhoea,
with its attendant weakness. In fact, in a big prison, astringent
medicines are served out regularly by the warders as a matter of course.
A child is as a rule incapable of eating the food at all. Anyone who
knows anything about children knows how easily a child's digestion is
upset by a fit of crying, or trouble and mental distress of any kind. A
child who has been crying all day long and perhaps half the night, in a
lonely, dimly lit cell, and is preyed upon by terror, simply cannot eat
food of this coarse, horrible kind. In the case of the little child to
whom Warder Martin gave the biscuits, the child was crying with hunger
on Tuesday morning, and utterly unable to eat the bread and water served
to it for breakfast.

"Martin went out after the breakfast had been served, and bought the few
sweet biscuits for the child rather than see it starving. It was a