Slopping out

Slopping out is the emptying of buckets of human waste when the cells are unlocked in prisons in the morning. Inmates without a toilet in the cell have to use a bucket or chamber pot while locked in during the night. The reason that some cells do not have toilets is that they date from the Victorian era and were therefore never originally designed to have toilets. As a result, there is no space in which to put a toilet, together with the expense and difficulty of installing the necessary plumbing.