4. Dickens found jail conditions in New York appalling in 1842
In New York City Dickens visited the city jail known then, as it is today, as the Tombs. One of his many questions to the guard who served as his guide was how that name had been arrived at, to which he received the aforementioned national answer in reply. In the Tombs, Dickens found men locked into tiny windowless cells, behind solid iron doors, where they remained 24 hours a day, with no opportunity for exercise or even sunlight. Most were awaiting trial, and some of the prisoners remained in such conditions for up to a year or more. Included in the cells, in the same manner, were prisoners in protective custody, such as witnesses for upcoming trials.
Dickens observed that in Great Britain, “if a man be under sentence of death, even he has air and exercise at certain periods of the day”. Besides the prison, Dickens described mid-19th century New York as dirty, with swine roaming freely in the streets, often past shops where whole slaughtered hogs hung in windows. After obtaining an escort of two policemen, Dickens ventured into the area of Five Points, one of the worst slums of the city, in his words, “a squalid square of leprous houses…all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here”. The tour through the slums led back to the Tombs, where prisoners awaiting morning magistrate courts were held overnight in basement cells, crawling with rats.