4
337
2.
"Corridors be included in the measurement." But whilst the returns of sleeping space for each prisoner is thus said to have been 863 cubic feet for the year 1876, Your Lordship will have seen from the memorandum of the Acting Superintendent of the Prison, enclosed in my despatch No. 33 of the 13th of June 1877, that for some months of the year 1876 the majority of the Chinese had less than 190 cubic feet of space, some of them as low as 165.
During the average of the whole year 1876 the space in the sleeping cells for the majority of the Chinese prisoners was under 200 cubic feet.
3.
The explanation of this discrepancy is to be found in the fact that the Hong Kong prison is divided into wards for Europeans and wards for Chinese; and that the European wards consist of cells in each of which generally one prisoner only is confined, whereas the Chinese wards consist of cells in each of which from three to nine prisoners are generally confined. Furthermore, the cells intended for debtors - some of which are often empty - are counted in the general average.