"In every ward of the female side a wards-woman is appointed to preserve order, and a similar regulation is adopted among the males. The wards-men and wards-women are all prisoners, selected for good conduct. They alone are allowed the privilege of sleeping on bedsteads: a small stump bedstead being placed in every ward for the purpose." This, in itself, was a vast improvement on the style of the last century in Newgate. Then the prisoner had no comfort unless he paid roundly for it. His cell contained a stone bench or two, on which the first comer might make his bed. The rest slept on the floor. Once in a great while a truss of straw was tossed in to them, as it might have been to a beast in a stall. This straw remained until it rotted to a pulp. Then another truss was used to scatter over it. So, in time, the prisoners slept on a veritable dunghill, the compost being generally left to fester till it bred a fever, when it would be carted off, to disseminate the germs of disease which it had engendered, outside the jail walls; and the same process was begun over again. In the matter of cleanliness a change for the better had been made in Dickens's time; but one great evil of the jail was the herding together of the prisoners in the wards. Here the possibly innocent learned evil lessons from the guilty; the depraved could deprave those not yet wholly debased; the gaol became, in short, not so much a place of punishment for crime as a powerful breeder of it, and many a man and boy, and woman and girl, who went into Newgate for a trivial offense, emerged from it a full-fledged and incorrigible lawbreaker. So outrageous did this condition of things become that many thoughtful men began seriously to question whether the means of restricting crime, as practiced in Newgate, were not really worse than the crime itself. In the sketch already quoted, Dickens says: