Though I have thankfully never been in prison, I spent some time working in prison ministry during my Wilderness Years, and the experience is indelibly burned into my brain.
However cold and brutal the physical surroundings might be, I noticed that the most powerful effect it had on the inmates was a nagging feeling of hopelessness, which, if not deliberately managed, could easily lead to a sort of insanity. Even those who looked forward to an imminent release were consumed by this dread, as if they somehow suspected that being back on the outside still could not redeem them.
Tom has been locked up for his debts, and I imagine he is finally realizing that he has passed the point of no return. His "wife" will only scold him, while Sarah faints from the awareness that he will never be the father and the husband she had once hoped for, and that there is absolutely nothing she can now do for him.
The very idea of a debtor's prison, where there is little prospect of ever escaping from a vicious cycle, might seem cruel to us, and yet I would argue that most forms of contemporary punishment still remain as the infliction of one harm for another harm. Tom cannot pay the jailer his fees, and he cannot pay the boy bringing him ale.
Tom is clutching at straws, desperate to find a way out, as a rejection letter from a publisher shows. His cellmates are also on the verge of madness, one who is writing a book about solving the national debt, though he ironically cannot manage his own, and another who is engaged in all sort of experiments.
The odd harness with the wings, over the bed, is surely a reference to Icarus, and tells us how these prisoners' dreams of escape are just as doomed.
William Hogarth, A Rake's Progress VII: The Prison (1734)
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