The wardens and the chief clerks of prisons often wish, for motives of
their own, to make an economical showing, and perhaps do not much care
if it is made at the expense of the health or lives of prisoners. Some
friends of mine in Atlanta prison and myself made an attempt to
determine just what was paid out per man in the prison for subsistence;
we quietly obtained statements from men in the kitchen and commissary
departments, and made our calculations. After careful revision, the
figures showed that we were being fed at the rate of from eight to
eleven cents per head, a day.
About that time, a great scientific discovery was announced by the chief
steward. Food, he had been informed, contained a certain amount of heat
and power; and these heat units, called calories, could be estimated for
any given article of diet. (As I write this, an editorial on the subject
in a recent issue of a New York newspaper states the matter in terms
which I am happy to reproduce.) "Physiologists have determined by
repeated experiments that a definite quantity of certain foods furnishes
a definite number of calories or heat units, which produce a certain
quantity of energy in the animal or human body.... In twenty-four hours
a normal man of about one hundred and thirty pounds at rest, needs 1680
calories or heat units, while a man doing severe physical labor would
require sufficient food to produce 3000 calories.
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