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Friends and relatives of the Price sisters have claimed that the pair were unjustly prosecuted and tried: that they received no legal advice until four days after their arrest, that authorities purposely shifted the trial from London to the more conservative town of Winchester. Their supporters have also charged that prison officials brutalized the sisters by force-feeding them during their long hunger strike. Force-feeding —in which a person's mouth is clamped open while a greased tube is inserted through his nose and a "complan" solution of iron, orange and milk-soaked glucose is poured directly into the stomach—usually causes acute vomiting.
The procedure can provide a starving victim with 1,750 calories a day, but it is an exhausting and frightening experience. Shortly before the government announced that the Price girls had ended their fast, their sister Clare reported that they weighed less than 98 Ibs. each, that their skin had turned waxen, their hair was falling out and their mouths were covered with sores. The prison dentist confirmed that the sisters' teeth had been loosened under pressure from the mouth clamp. Last month, after doctors had said that the girls would probably die sooner from continued force-feeding than from fasting, officials halted the procedure.
At week's end it was still uncertain how soon, if ever, the Prices would recover from their ordeal. Or whether, even if their flirtation with martyrdom has been happily aborted, they will be able to retain their heroine status once they are no longer a political cause celebre.