The dormitories contain curious looking long rooms with passages down the middle and on each side rows of couches made of hard baked mud. The prisoners are provided with blankets and mattresses made of rice straw, and they can be fairly comfortable. Even beds made out of such material have been diverted to other uses by the ingenious inmates. A convict is said to have made a pipe out of his bed. By hollowing out a place near the head of the bed and plastering it over, he made two holes, one to hold the tobacco and ashes, and the other to serve as a mouthpiece.
As an additional precautionary measure to prevent plague from entering the gaol, every prisoner who catches a rat and produces it alive is given a reward of ten marks. This is a distinct gain toward a shorter sentence, for twenty-four marks means one day’s remission. It has been surmised, as the rats are very numerous in the gaol in spite of wire netting everywhere placed to keep them out, that either the warders arrange to bring them in or the prisoners maintain reserves for breeding purposes.
The cook-house is in the yard where the men are paraded. Two meals are served daily, one at 7.30 A. M. and the other after 5 P. M., but in addition a little parched boiled _gram_ is given to each convict in the middle of the day, when there is a short recess from work. Besides the large _chupattis_, made of wheat and Indian corn, a few ounces of _dal_ are served in the morning, and vegetables with condiments in the evening. All the vegetables and condiments are produced by the convicts in the large garden attached to the gaol.
It is said that no convict has ever gotten away altogether, but that those who manage to escape occasionally are always recaptured. As the gaol is situated in a large desert, tracking the runaways is comparatively easy. On one occasion, a man was apparently missing at evening roll-call. For considerable time his identity could not be ascertained, but after a thorough search and re-checking, it was remembered that a murderer had been hanged that day, and the officials had failed to strike his name from the roll.
The hospital is exceedingly clean and well kept. The routine of the gaol generally runs smoothly, and the character of the treatment and discipline in this typical prison of India will bear comparison with that in many institutions of a like kind at home and abroad.