James Lyall served as home secretary in the Raj government, and was also tasked with an investigation of the penal settlement at Port Blair. Both he and A. S. Lethbridge, a surgeon in the IMS, concluded that the punishment of transportation to the Andaman Islands was failing to achieve the purpose intended and that indeed criminals preferred to go there rather than be incarcerated in Indian jails. Lyall and Lethbridge recommended that a "penal stage" should exist in the transportation sentence, whereby transported prisoners were subjected to a period of harsh treatment upon arrival. The outcome was the construction of the Cellular Jail, which has been described as "a place of exclusion and isolation within a more broadly constituted remote penal space." Architecture The construction of the prison started in 1896 and was completed in 1906. The original building was a puce-coloured brick building. The bricks used to build the building were brought from Burma. The building had seven wings, at the center of which a tower served as the intersection and was used by guards to keep watch on the inmates; this format was based on Jeremy Bentham's idea of the Panopticon. The wings radiated from the tower in straight lines, much like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Each of the seven wings had three stories upon completion. There were no dormitories and a total of 696 cells. Each cell was in size with a ventilator located at a height of . The name, "cellular jail", derived from the solitary cells which prevented any prisoner from communicating with any other. Also, the spokes were so designed such that the face of a cell in a spoke saw the back of cells in another spoke. This way, communication between prisoners was impossible. They were all in solitary confinement. The locks of the prison cells were designed in such a way that the inmate would never be able to reach the latch of the lock. The prison guards would lock up the inmates and throw the key of the lock inside the jail. The inmate would try to put his hand out and try to unlock the door but would never be able to do so as his hand would never reach the lock. Prison conditions and inmates Conditions faced by prisoners in the Cellular Jail were frequently abysmal. As noted in a Guardian article, prisoner could face "torture, medical