Feeding ‘Growing Boys’ and Nourishing ‘Handy English Lads’: British Prison Diets and the Reclamation of the Male Juvenile Offender, 1895–1908

Abstract

AbstractBetween 1895 and 1908, Britain's prison administration introduced reforms aimed at ‘reclaiming’ male adolescent offenders. These included a significant rethinking of the dietary. Drawing on the sciences of nutrition and of adolescent development, the prison experimented with the rations for juvenile–adults, a new category of inmate defined by age and by gender. For the first time, the state explicitly used prison rations in the service of sovereignty: it sought to fashion working‐class male adolescents into well‐developed specimens of British manhood able to contribute to the increasingly democratic polity and to defend and populate the nation and its empire.