Prison Life

INTO THE PENITENTIARY

Among the significant common experiences in penitentiary life, one that became increasingly standardized in the post-Confederation era was the admission ritual. Thousands of convicts arriving at Kingston Penitentiary experienced the first hours of prison life in much the same way. A great deal of what they encountered was designed to instill important messages about the penitentiary, its power structures, and the new prisoner’s place within them. Most offenders came to the penitentiary from local gaols, where they were held while waiting for the quarterly assize and during a short trial before a magistrate. After sentencing, the prisoner departed for the penitentiary in the custody of a sheriff. Most travelled to Kingston by stage or by train. In the early part of the century, it was customary for the sheriff to share a drink with the prisoner just before arriving at the penitentiary. After Confederation, however, prisoners were required to sit silently in handcuffs throughout the journey.

With regard to the “typical” experience, it should be noted that much less is known about the admittance procedure and daily routines of female prisoners. We can be certain that these routines would have differed from what is described below, given the separate confinement of women at Kingston, but the paucity of first-hand records obviously makes it difficult to describe women’s experiences behind bars. Thus, although I refer below to specific examples involving women prisoners, the available evidence does not allow definitive conclusions about penal practice with respect to women, and I therefore use the masculine pronoun unless specifically referring to women prisoners.

Arriving at Kingston Penitentiary, the average male prisoner was taken through the main gates at the keeper’s lodge and handed over to a steward. Moving into the keeper’s hall, the prisoner was searched, relieved of all personal possessions, and then stripped so his clothing could be burned. He was then given a rough haircut and a shave by a convict barber before being bathed. A steward marched the prisoner to the prison storeroom to receive his prison uniform. Meeting the clothing clerk, who was usually a long-serving prisoner, the new inmate quickly realized his position within the convict population. New prisoners and first-time offenders were given the dregs of the penitentiary clothing supply—dirty, used, and shabby clothing and scuffed or broken boots. In this outfit, the “new fish” was easily identified by the other prisoners. “Old hands,” or recommitted prisoners, knew enough to stand up to the clothing clerk and demand a newly sewn set of clothing. Even a first-time prisoner could avoid this indignity if he knew enough to have a clergyman or influential citizen write to the warden on his behalf, and the order would be communicated to the clothing supply room.⁵

If a prisoner had no friend to speak on his behalf, much could be accomplished by bribing convict clerks or junior keepers. While prisoners were told upon transfer from provincial or local gaols that money would not be needed and would be taken from them when admitted to the penitentiary, cash was actually a crucial necessity in easing the pains of adopting to penitentiary life. A correspondent writing in The Labour Union recounted how a friend thrust a ten-dollar bill into his pocket as he boarded the train from Toronto en route to Kingston Penitentiary as a first-time prisoner:

God bless him! The officers were lamentably mistaken. Money is the one thing needful there. Never go to the Penitentiary without cash if you can help it. It gets you when there new clothes cut in the latest style, and served with as many different colored threads as you choose. It furnishes you with a patent swing bed, easy chair, carpet slippers for the evening and as many different kinds of boots and shoes as your taste may suggest for working in. It converts your government straw pillow into something nice for your uneasy head. Puts sugar in your coffee, butter on your dry bed, milk in your tea … often secures you a “soft job” and procures you a bottle of “booze”—the penitentiary term for spirits—as often as you want it.⁶

This first-time prisoner was shocked to discover that one of the experienced “gaol birds” travelling to Kingston to serve a fourteen-year sentence managed to conceal two hundred dollars in two-dollar bills to help ease his transition back into penitentiary life.⁷

Once dressed, the new prisoner was taken into the heart of the penitentiary to the prisoner cell blocks. At Kingston, men were shown into a cell that measured seven feet long and two and a half feet wide. Cells at the newer institutions were slightly larger.⁸ In addition to a bed, which was folded and raised against the wall to allow entry, the cell contained a water jug, a basin, and a night bucket. Two blankets, a sheet, and a rug hung from the wall, and on a shelf beneath the tiny window, the inmate found a Bible and a randomly chosen book from the prison library. If prisoners could read, they would notice a list of detailed penitentiary rules and regulations posted to the wall. The poster listed eighteen “prison offences” and eighteen corresponding “punishments.” Starting with admonishment or loss of light for “violation of the rule of silence,” the punishments increased in severity for more violent transgressions such as fighting (dark cell for a week), immoral conduct (flogging), and attempted escape (solitary cell, leg irons for a month).⁹ If a prisoner arrived in the morning, he was taken to the dining hall to wait for the rest of the working population. When they arrived, he joined them for a soup of beef broth with bread before being swept into the flow of daily labour with the other working inmates.

In the prison yard, the new inmate met with the deputy warden, who questioned him on his mechanical and technical abilities. If he was like the majority of penitentiary inmates, he possessed none and was thus “condemned” to work on the stone pile. For the remainder of the day, he worked his first shift of penitentiary labour—sitting on a low stool, he would break rocks into gravel with an enormous hammer. At 5:30, a bell sounded and he went to supper with the rest of the inmates before returning to his cell for his first night in the penitentiary. At 8:45 a bell sounded again, and the prison lights were turned down for the night. There the prisoner sat or slept in silence until the routine began again the next morning at 5:50. This was the unyielding regimen that he followed every day but Sunday for the remainder of his sentence. The days and weeks after this first day would follow the same dreary and repetitive routine. Table 2 shows the 1886 schedule for Manitoba Penitentiary, but it was remarkably similar for all five federal institutions.

SOURCE: "Warden's Report, Manitoba Penitentiary,''*Sessional Tapers, 1886, no. 15, 61.

The first hours of a prisoner’s time in a federal penitentiary were designed to achieve a symbolic break with his or her criminal past and, importantly, with the criminal subcultures from which authorities assumed prisoners were drawn. This contrasted dramatically with the less formal rhythms of eighteenth-century prison regimes that treated inmates more like residents than prisoners. The newly regimented penitentiary included two key elements that submerged the prisoner’s former identity: the prison uniform and the use of numbers in place of names. The prison uniform was calculated to distance prisoners from their past life, while it also made it easy to recognize inmates and thereby prevent escapes. Canadian penitentiaries featured a variation of prison stripes consisting of a bisected suit of yellow and brown. In the early 1890s, the uniform was altered because reformers argued that the “prison stripes” were a demoralizing and degrading relic of an earlier era. Inspector Moylan wrote,

If there is one thing more than another, in any system of prison administration, that is calculated to demoralize and stamp out every vestige of manhood and self-respect, it is the zebra and piebald raiment which forms such a cruelly distinctive and prominent feature of some penal institutions. This barbarous relic of a period, when no consideration was extended to the convict, when no interest was felt in his amelioration or well being should, with the “goose step,” be incontinently done away with everywhere as out of keeping with our progress and enlightenment and unworthy of a Christian people.¹⁰

When the minister of Justice announced the change to a new convict uniform in 1890, the praise was overwhelming. Instead of the brown and yellow, the penitentiary system moved to a uniform scheme involving three levels, each corresponding to a classification of convict behaviour. The intended effect was to dress prisoners in uniforms that would give them the appearance of “ordinarily dressed citizens” and help to foster individuality rather than conformity and degradation. Alexander Maconochie had proposed the same reform at Norfolk Island in 1840. But not all wardens agreed with the reform. Warden Bedson at Manitoba Penitentiary argued that the change tended too much toward treating the prisoners like regular citizens and requested permission to dress his prisoners in knickerbockers with coloured stockings for easier detection in the event of escapes.¹¹

A similar debate was carried out regarding the use of numbers rather than names to identify prisoners. The rationale behind prisoner numbers was originally to obscure both the identity and the crime of each individual in the institution. This was essentially a less severe method of obscuring identity than the early practice at Pennsylvania Penitentiary, which employed a hood over the head of convicts so they could never be identified in the prison or after release. Not surprisingly, the use of numbers in modern penitentiaries was totally ineffective for the intended purposes. As Moylan noted, “The history of each criminal soon becomes well known to his fellows.”¹² In fact, Moylan argued strenuously against the practice of obscuring the identity of convicts, suggesting that it debased and humiliated men to be referred to by anonymous numbers:

There is a cold cruelty to burying a prisoner’s identity, in indicating or addressing him by a number instead of his name, that must constantly humiliate, irritate and wound his feelings and lessen his self-respect. It is one of those relics of the barbarity practiced towards convicts, before Howard and Wilberforce called public attention to the inhuman treatment to which they were subjected. Like the “goose-step” treadmill, shot drill and the like cruelties, the designating of convicts by their “numbers” should become a “memory,” though an unpleasant one, “of the past.”¹³

Typically, the most vocal proponent of the use of numbers instead of personal names was Samuel Bedson, who emerged at the end of his tenure as something of an anti-reform voice in the penitentiary administration. He was particularly supportive of policies, such as prison uniforms and numbers, that others regarded as degrading to the convict’s individuality.¹⁴ The debate, limited as it was in the Canadian context, revealed how the reform movement was gradually exerting influence over penitentiary practices intended to address criminality.

The common elements of the admission ritual, which was bound to hygiene movements of the mid-nineteenth century, eventually included medical inspection. At Kingston Penitentiary, new prisoners were inspected on the morning after admission by the surgeon while he attended to general convict complaints. Some prisoners reported having undergone only a cursory examination, but at certain institutions, it was far more complete. Warden Bedson at Manitoba Penitentiary stated that his medical officer undertook a rigorous inspection of every new inmate, recording all information on a “medical examination sheet,” which was used to compare the physical well-being of the same prisoner when he was eventually released.¹⁵ Although the medical inspection was designed to catch contagious or degenerative disease in new prisoners, it was also a method of classifying and identifying new convicts. Tattoos, scars, and deformities were all noted in prison registers. These characteristics were particularly helpful in identifying former prisoners in instances of recidivism or escape. In the years after 1890, most penitentiaries acquired photography equipment to make this task much easier, creating mug shot–style records of every new convict.

THE SILENT WORLD

Life in a modern penitentiary was supposed to be carried out in unbroken silence. Both the separate system and the Auburn system were designed around the idea that prisoners would live from day to day in silent isolation from each other, never speaking or communicating in any way. In reality, penitentiaries were necessarily noisy institutions because their operation included workshops, factories, chapels, hospitals, and dormitories. In the silent system, however, all communication was forbidden under threat of punishment. The first written penitentiary regulations at Kingston demanded unbroken silence and “perfect obedience and submission to the keepers.”¹⁶ As noted earlier, the punishment for breaking this rule in the early years at Kingston could be unyielding and brutal.

In the post-Confederation era, Canadian penitentiaries were still organized around the basic principles of the silent system, but the ways in which it was implemented were uneven and conflicted. As late as 1889, the penitentiary regulations stated, “Every officer shall see that the silent system is strictly carried out. He shall not permit one convict to speak to another on any pretence nor to himself on any matter except the work at the moment in hand, and then only in the fewest words and in respectful terms.”¹⁷ But several penitentiary officials openly admitted that the rule could not be enforced. In 1878 Inspector Moylan wrote, “It is almost an impossibility to exact a strict observance of the rule of silence where convicts are employed in associated labor during the day. To talk and commune among themselves whenever an opportunity offers, no matter what the penalty, is a temptation which few convicts can resist. It is human and natural.”¹⁸ The Roman Catholic chaplain at St. Vincent de Paul in Québec made a similar argument, calling the rule of silence “impossible” and “unnatural.” He wrote, “As long as you mix the convicts together, they will converse. To ask an absolute silence and expose them at the same time to the temptation of conversing with each other, or to set them to work side by side, I consider is asking more than we have a right to ask.”¹⁹ Such conflicted views help to explain why the rule of silence was enforced so arbitrarily. Conversations at mealtimes were particularly heavily policed. Throughout this era, prisoners sat back to back along just one side of the dining tables so they could not easily converse. But in other situations, during the work day or in the comings and goings of groups of convicts, the rule was certainly relaxed.

Among all wardens in the post-Confederation era, Samuel Bedson at Manitoba was the most rigorous about maintaining silence in the penitentiary. By the late 1870s and early 1880s, breaching the rule of silence was seldom a punishable offence at Kingston, but Manitoba continued to enforce it with rigour. In 1877, shortly after Manitoba Penitentiary opened, Bedson complained in the warden’s order book “that a great deal of talking is carried on by the convicts when confined in their respective cells.” He cautioned the prisoners that every man in the penitentiary would pay the consequences if the conversations did not stop.²⁰ Two years later, attempting to identify a prisoner in the west wing who was making noise after lights out, the warden made the same threat. Bedson entered in his order book, “[I am] determined to put a stop to such conduct and in order to reach the individual at fault will punish all in the vicinity of the noises and take the present opportunity of calling upon convicts to protect themselves from being punished by bringing to notice the one at fault.”²¹ Bedson was so determined to maintain absolute silence on the cell blocks that he devised a system involving signal sticks to prevent any speaking. Each prisoner was given a four-foot wand that was painted white. One end was painted black for signalling non-urgent concerns to the guards while the opposite end, which was red, would signal an urgent situation, all in total silence.²²

Although it was not always enforced, the rule of silence provided keepers with the mechanism to demand the absolute subservience of the prison population when they so desired. This was a powerful tool, but staff were also aware that their hand could easily be overplayed. Power struggles such as those waged by Bedson were rarely productive, and the more practical wardens studiously avoided showdowns in which they could lose face. Indeed, all of Warden Bedson’s efforts amounted to little more than bluster. Prisoners were unlikely to inform on each other or to end their communication. Even with little to lose, prisoners stayed loyal to each other. At British Columbia Penitentiary, the staff interrogated inmates who had been discharged about where conversations were taking place throughout the prison. Nearly every respondent simply said, “I do not know.”²³ Throughout the nineteenth century and within different types of disciplinary regime, prisoners found innumerable ways to communicate with each other. In every institution, the prisoners knew of remote locations where they could meet and carry out conversations. In the evenings, they whispered between cells through the ventilators or passed notes up and down the cell blocks using pilfered string and bits of paper.

In spite of the clamour and the concealed conversation, sometimes the penitentiary really did sink into unbearable silence. This was particularly the case in special cell blocks like the Prison of Isolation at Kingston, completed in 1892 and reserved for inmates considered irredeemable, and the women’s prison. Louisa Sturdy, a former inmate of the women’s prison at Kingston who sold her story to The Globe, described a night when she could not sleep: “The solitude seemed to be so dreary that even the footsteps of a rat might have been heard through the corridor.” Sturdy listened in the silence and heard the “sweet soprano, tremolo voice” of a young girl singing the lines “Jesus lover of my soul / Let me to Thy bosom fly.” She recalled,

How sweet and clear her voice and those words sounded through that silent corridor I shall never be able to tell. No doubt she had learnt it in a Sunday school in her earlier innocent days and had become repentant as she lay sleeplessly on her bed. But this is not all. She had evidently forgotten the other lines of the hymn and there she stopped for a while. But her heart seemed to burst for song, and she struck up again, sweeter than ever,

“Rock of ages … For me,
Let me hide myself in thee.”²⁴

As Louisa Sturdy’s account highlights, prison could be a numbing and lonely experience. The constant effort at communication between prisoners speaks not only to conspiracy, as penitentiary officials were apt to see, but also to the desire for human connection. Certainly, penitentiary life offered few other comforts. Illicit communication surely provided some reprieve from the drudgery.

Two small luxuries allowed to prisoners were mail from the outside world and tobacco. Originally, tobacco was introduced to Kingston Penitentiary by contractors in the 1830s and 1840s to secure the loyalty of convicts assigned to the various industries. By the post-Confederation era, tobacco was a standard-issue ration for each inmate, although how it was distributed and in what quantity often varied from one institution to another. Some wardens objected to tobacco entirely, an opinion that was raised repeatedly in the House of Commons when elected members realized that each penitentiary was expending up to five hundred dollars a year in tobacco distribution.²⁵ Some wardens also campaigned against rampant tobacco use because of its disruptive effect in underground prison economies. In 1900 Kingston surgeon Daniel Phelan wrote, “The nefarious traffic carried on in trading tobacco for other articles among the prisoners, its being offered as a bribe in many instances, and its procurement by those who do not use it, to sell it or trade it to those who do, are some very strong reasons against its use. In many instances the habit of using it has been first acquired in prison.”²⁶ The surgeon also worried that the practice of biting the same plugs of tobacco up and down a cell block was spreading syphilis throughout the prison population. Smoking homemade cigarettes was hardly more sanitary in Phelan’s eyes, as it filled the dormitories with a heavy smoke every night.²⁷ However, like conversation, wardens and keepers were powerless to completely restrict tobacco use, and eliminating it entirely as a matter of discipline would have courted disaster (as we will see below when this measure was taken at St. Vincent de Paul in 1897). In most institutions, the officials realized that it was far more effective to use tobacco as an inducement to good behaviour and as a punishment for transgressions. Thus, along with depriving inmates of light or bread and water, one of the most frequent punishments noted on registers in the post-Confederation era was the loss of tobacco.

Mail and personal visitors gave prisoners rare opportunities for connection with the outside world. Both of these privileges were greatly restricted in the pre–Brown Commission era, but under the influence of reform, both became a more regular part of prison life after 1850. Mail was not particularly private because both incoming and outgoing correspondence was read by keepers and heavily censored. In the 1860s, Kingston kept a register of all outgoing mail, tracking who wrote each letter, who it was intended for, and the general subject of correspondence. These subject lines, sometimes recorded verbatim from the text of the letter, provide a glimpse of the alienation of prison life. Many letters written by the prisoners were simple reassurances about the writer’s health or adaptation to penitentiary life. One subject line read “Is doing very well and is satisfied. Every one kind to him.” Other letters hinted at the pain of being separated from family. The subject of one letter was listed as “Finds the time too long. Do not abandon the children.” Often prisoners wrote to family or friends asking for some sort of greater connection or pleading for return correspondence. Many writers requested a “likeness” of family members to keep with them at the penitentiary. The desire for connection is palpable even in the truncated recording of the correspondence register. Several prisoners included “Write often” at the end of a letter. More heartbreaking were letters that asked simply, “Why do you not write?”²⁸

THE SCREWS

That keepers were not all-powerful was underscored by the fact that they too were subject to surveillance and domination while on the job. At each institution, the staff discipline was largely determined by the character of the warden. In Manitoba Penitentiary’s early years, Warden Samuel Bedson administered his institution with military precision, subjecting his staff to discipline and surveillance that was hardly less rigorous than what the prisoners experienced. For example, guards were included in Bedson’s demand for absolute attention to the rule of silence. In 1879 the warden complained that his staff were conversing with each other too loudly throughout the prison; he ordered them to whisper in a tone low enough that no prisoner could overhear a conversation between two of them.²⁹ Several years later, he ordered the night shifts to patrol the cell blocks in their stocking feet because the heels of their boots created too much noise.³⁰ Bedson did not make idle threats against his staff; he enforced staff discipline with a punitive system of fines that kept his inferior officers in a constant state of alertness. Insolence, a missed shift or arriving late, and general misconduct were all punished by surprisingly costly fines. In August 1877 Bedson fined guard Wagner fifteen dollars for “insolence to the chief guard.”³¹ A turnkey named Davis Little was the target of multiple disciplinary reports: several times in early 1876, he was fined five dollars for lateness or missed shifts, and in late May, he received a fine of thirty dollars for “misconduct.”³² Little was only paid $480.00 per year, and his total fines of at least fifty dollars in 1876 must have seemed onerous.

In 1883 Inspector Moylan lamented that the penitentiary staff itself was a constant hindrance to the progress of penitentiary reform because of both the type of individual that prison work attracted and the often brutal working and living conditions associated with life as a penitentiary guard:

There never will be any possible improvement in the discipline as long as the personnel is not itself improved, and the personnel will never improve as long as the salary remains as it does to-day. Be that as it may, a learned, sober and intelligent man will never consent to come and bury himself, I might say, in a Penitentiary, and pass his time in the midst of criminals—to expose his life and labor incessantly from six o’clock in the morning to six o’clock at night—Sunday not even excepted—for a salary of four hundred and fifty dollars ($450). Some twenty or thirty years ago such a salary was sufficient; but to-day such a thing is unheard of. The necessities of life are far more expensive than they were then; labor is more in demand and the pay is much better.³³

Moylan’s choice of words was appropriate, for taking employment in the penitentiary was indeed similar to being “buried” in the institution. Staff members not only worked in the penitentiary, but they lived there as well, in quarters provided by the institution. Some of the prisons featured staff quarters that were somewhat separate from the actual penitentiary, but other staff quarters were simple apartments in one part of the main penitentiary building. By the 1880s and 1890s, some federal penitentiaries featured small cottages for married staff, and the warden of each institution was provided with a very respectable house connected to the institution. But for the lowest-paid members of the staff, the turnkeys and guards, living conditions were not substantially different from those of the prisoners. In the early 1880s, Moylan admitted that “they live miserably while they are in the service” and that this was largely a function of the extremely low wages that were comparable to the poorest-paid working-class labourers.³⁴ Table 3 shows the remuneration of officers at Manitoba Penitentiary in 1878; while the staff was small, the salaries were representative of wages for the same positions in penitentiaries throughout the dominion.

INSUBORDINATION AND VIOLENCE

Penitentiary life was a particularly rough culture, but this was often hidden from view and obscured in the official records. Wardens and inspectors, the public faces of the penitentiary service, wrote in the language of respectable and gentlemanly bureaucrats. Their vernacular often made the penitentiary appear more civil than it was in daily practice. This was by design, but it also hinted at the fact that, apart from unusual circumstances, the warden had little contact with the penitentiary population in day-to-day life. Although his presence was required at many points throughout the day, he tended to float through the penitentiary like a figurehead and established little real contact with the prisoners under his charge. In fact, junior officers at Manitoba Penitentiary were reminded by the warden that, like the prisoners, they were forbidden to address him directly. All of their questions and concerns were relayed through the deputy warden so that Bedson would be spared any inconvenience.³⁵

SOURCE: "Warden's Annual Report. Manitoba Penitentiary," Sessional Papers, 1870, no. 27,159.

In the relationship between prisoners and keepers, a far grittier conversation marked the everyday intercourse of penitentiary life. Exchanges between keepers and prisoners were marked with profanity. Some of it was good-natured and ribald. When prisoners spoke to guards like this, it was unlikely to be considered insubordinate. However, in the right context, obscene language was one of the few methods of non-violent resistance that the prisoners could deploy, and guards quickly perceived the difference. It is clear from punishment reports that not every incident of profanity was reported or punished, but certain exchanges clearly raised the ire of guards and were subsequently the subject of disciplinary reports. For example, while performing outdoor labour, George Hewell, a Kingston prisoner (and the subject of a case study in chapter 6), told a guard “to go and fuck [him]self.” Hewell was punished for this with bread and water.³⁶ In another incident that appeared in punishment records, British Columbia prisoner Symon Strater was put in chains for calling a guard, “a God damn brute” and telling him to “go home and kick your wife and children.”³⁷ In most instances, the penitentiary guard could match the prisoner’s obscenity. Most exchanges such as these transpired without incident, but the odd prisoner complained about a remark that cut too close. A Manitoba Penitentiary inmate, for instance, complained to the warden that a guard had made an off-colour remark about having sex with the inmate’s wife. The warden responded facetiously that it was a “very unlikely remark for one man to make about another.”³⁸

More effective methods of insubordination involved doing something that openly broke the rules for the sake of defiance. Whereas a profane remark could be shrugged off, other acts of insubordination garnered more attention. Refusing to work was the most common method of resistance, and prisoners employed it for a number of reasons. Sometimes they protested poor working conditions or domineering farming or industrial instructors. Private contractors evaded such complaints by dispensing liberal quantities of tobacco, but penitentiary keepers were less inclined to grant this privilege. They could afford to be more stringent because they could also exercise the power to initiate punishment, which contractors could not in the years after 1850. Refusing to work was a dangerous rebellion to which penitentiary officials reacted swiftly. A prisoner’s first incident of insubordination of this type resulted in three meals of bread and water, and the punishments grew swiftly more serious after that. The dark cell was threatening enough to keep most prisoners at work, and those who repeated an offence could be flogged on the back or whipped on the hands. As I discuss in the next chapter, a far more effective and less insubordinate way of avoiding labour was to feign sickness, which also entailed a lower risk of punishment.

Occasionally, insubordination flared up as an expression of pure frustration or anger. George Le Londe, a prisoner at Manitoba Penitentiary, erupted in anger after being ordered to clean his untidy cell in March 1889. He swore at the guard and told him to “do it himself.” He was dragged to the warden’s office, where Bedson told him his remaining remission time would be cancelled. On returning to his cell, Le Londe proceeded to tear his bedding to pieces before moving on to the curtains and rug. He was removed and taken to a bare cell but could not regain his composure. He tore up the oak flooring and threw it, plank by plank, through the bars of his cell. He then spent the week in an isolation cell in darkness.³⁹ The same year, another prisoner at Manitoba, Richard Phillips, destroyed the walls of his cell in a similar way. The warden reported that he did this in a spirit of “pure wantonness” while refusing to engage in any labour.⁴⁰ Such protests were regarded with gravity by penitentiary officials, but they are remarkable for being essentially non-violent expressions of anger and frustration. In fact, violence between prisoners and keepers was extremely rare throughout the nineteenth century, perhaps because the consequences of such attacks were inordinately more severe than for non-violent insubordination and resistance. This is not to say that violence was not an everyday part of penitentiary life, however: incidents of interpersonal violence and assault between prisoners were far more common than those between prisoners and keepers.

Intimidation and bullying, like tobacco, were currencies of power in penitentiary life. Stronger prisoners, those who possessed physical strength or strong social networks within the penitentiary, bullied and exploited the vulnerable. All of this occurred beneath the surface of everyday life, but it was not completely obscured. In some penitentiary records, we can identify bullies and the bullied through disciplinary reports. For example, at British Columbia Penitentiary, an unfortunate prisoner named Charley was the constant target of ridicule and abuse from other prisoners. Probably a First Nations or Chinese man (because he was known only by a first name), Charley was a “waiter” who delivered rations and supplies to prisoners undergoing punishment in the dark cells. In this job, he was a frequent target for the abuse and anger of punished men. In August 1889 he was, on several occasions, doused with the contents of a night bucket by prisoner Ah Pow. Another Chinese prisoner was punished for throwing a cup of coffee in Charley’s face as he made his rounds. A prisoner named Thomas Wilson was reported multiple times for fighting but was never regarded as an instigator of these confrontations. Like Charley, he was probably seen by other prisoners as an easy mark and drawn into repeated conflict.⁴¹

In some instances, long-running feuds between prisoners erupted into sudden violence. In June 1905 a fight broke out at Manitoba Penitentiary between prisoners Biddle and Runwell during Sunday religious services. According to witnesses, some insulting remark passed between the men while they were singing. As Runwell sat back in his pew at the conclusion of the hymn, Biddle kicked him in the back of the head. Runwell turned to deliver a blow and a fight erupted. A nearby friend of Biddle jumped to his defence and joined the melee. All three men spent six months in the Prison of Isolation as a punishment.⁴² In other examples, violent confrontations were less spontaneous. In the early 1870s, James McCabe, a prisoner at Kingston, became too close to the penitentiary guard for the liking of the other members of his work detail. He incurred their wrath by urging them to work harder. According to the warden, McCabe was the most useful prisoner in the institution and more knowledgeable about the industries than many of the keepers. The favouritism shown to McCabe by the keepers bred much resentment toward him. The guards learned that a group of prisoners planned to corner McCabe and “lick him” at the soonest opportunity. Anticipating the attack, McCabe carried a long knife with him as protection. All of these details were brought to the attention of Warden Creighton, who wrote this surprising entry in his order book: “These men and one or two others have threatened McCabe’s life for no other reason than that he urged them to greater activity when working with him in the stone truck—I have not objected to his defending himself of being murderously attacked.”⁴³ Creighton’s trust in McCabe was probably misplaced as he escaped from Kingston Penitentiary in 1881, only to be shot two days later by a constable in Port Hope.⁴⁴ The McCabe incident illustrates how dangerous penitentiary life could become for prisoners who ran afoul of particular standards of behaviour that inmates were expected to uphold. In the most extreme circumstances, altercations over these issues led to murder.

One of the most sensational cases involved the murder of Thomas Salter, a St. Vincent de Paul prisoner, in 1881. Salter was the son of a respectable Montreal family who, according to The Globe, got into bad company and was sentenced to two years at St. Vincent de Paul for jewel theft.⁴⁵ Soon after arriving at the penitentiary, Salter fell in with a group of prisoners plotting an escape, but their plans were discovered. The men apparently blamed Salter for leaking the plot to penitentiary officials and vowed revenge against him. As the inmates marched from dinner on the evening of June 30, prisoner Hugh Hayvern grabbed Salter and plunged a knife deep into his chest. Salter exclaimed, “Oh, my god!” and staggered to the door of the hospital. He was taken by a group of horrified convicts to the nearest bed, where he died less than ten minutes later. Hayvern was tried and convicted for the murder of Thomas Salter and executed six months later.⁴⁶

In addition to violent attack, scattered evidence in penitentiary records show that sexual assault was an ever-present concern. When officials worried about the “corruption” of young prisoners, they were often referencing more than just criminal contamination through contact with hardened offenders. The possibility of sexual assault was a primary motivation in keeping child convicts physically segregated from the adult prisoners. Even older youths of fifteen and sixteen were recognized as being extremely vulnerable to both influence and sexual attack, and were often given special consideration. In 1898, for example, Manitoba Penitentiary received fifteen-year-old Fred Belter, who had been born in Russia and spoke very little English. He was sent to sleep in the hospital rather than a standard cell so that the hospital overseer and the schoolmaster could keep watch over him at all times.⁴⁷

In spite of the extra protection given to young boys, there are clear indications that youths were not kept completely separated from the adults in every institution. This left them vulnerable to contact, which drew them into exploitive relationships, sexual and otherwise, with other inmates. In most cases, the record provides only the barest hint of this subculture. For example, a fight between two convicts at Manitoba Penitentiary in 1905 was explained by the reporting guard: “McInerney seemed jealous of and enraged at Price for some attention shown to a boy convict.”⁴⁸ Other cases pointed more directly at ongoing sexual contact. At Kingston in 1906, guard Edward Walsh was informed by a prisoner that a young boy named Bruce Mayberry was alone in a cell with another inmate. The informant added “that Mayberry was only a boy and he feared the other fellow would get him into trouble.”⁴⁹ Walsh rushed to the cell and found Mayberry in a prone position with his pants down. Witnesses later told the keepers that the boy had gone into the cell willingly and was in fact seen climbing from one cell block to another to reach the man. Was this encounter consensual?

Steven Maynard’s work on the sexual exploitation of youths at Maple Leaf Gardens in the 1960s reveals the troubling complexities of attempting to attribute motivation to the youthful participants in sexual relationships between men and boys.⁵⁰ Maynard tried to interject ambiguity into essentially exploitive relationships. Whether we identify sexual relationships in the penitentiary as “abuse” or mere “illicit sexuality,” however, can be settled by attention to what Veronica Strong-Boag calls the contextual importance of violence in such situations.⁵¹ The penitentiary was an environment in which the power imbalance between men and boys often placed young prisoners in an inescapable position that was unlikely to be consensual. But the keepers at Kingston Penitentiary came to a different conclusion on this question. Noting Mayberry’s “willingness” to reach the older prisoner, both participants were punished with six months in the isolation cells.⁵² Similar to situations when women were assaulted by guards or other prisoners and became pregnant, penitentiary officials were not above blaming youths for their participation in sexual relationships. Children in the penitentiary occupied an impossible position in the power relations between themselves and older, more dominant prisoners.

ESCAPE

One of the enduring realities of penitentiary life was that almost all prisoners were desperate to get away from it. Some took more drastic measures than others, but the widespread desire for escape required officials to be on constant alert. “The thoughts of ninety-nine out of every hundred convicts are constantly bent on escaping,” wrote Inspector Moylan.⁵³ Protecting against escape was often made more difficult by the fact that several of the penitentiaries were surprisingly insecure in design, geographic situation, and management of the prisoners. While Kingston was protected by an impressive boundary wall, Manitoba, British Columbia, and Dorchester did not have this security. When Manitoba Penitentiary opened, it also lacked many other security measures required by a prison. For example, the Department of Public Works originally installed locks that could be opened from the inside. Moreover, within five years of opening, both Manitoba and British Columbia were so overcrowded that some inmates slept on cots in hallways rather than in locked cells.⁵⁴ Adding to such insecurities was the fact that all penitentiaries relied upon outdoor labour that often took the prisoners up to two kilometres outside of the boundary walls. This provided a dangerous invitation to escape that some prisoners could not resist.

Between 1867 and 1900, approximately one hundred men escaped from Canadian federal penitentiaries. The exact number is difficult to pin down from penitentiary records because the success of an escape was often relative to whether and how quickly the prisoners were recaptured. Sometimes escapes were noted as “attempted escape,” but no uniform system existed for deciding what constituted escapes and attempted escapes. In some instances, prisoners escaped and remained at large for weeks, months, or years before they were found. Once discovered, these individuals were reported as “recommitted” or “recaptured.” It is clear that the vast majority of escape attempts were unsuccessful. For example, in 1876 alone, only five of the sixteen attempts at Kingston were successful. In 1885 twenty prisoners attempted escape but only five found freedom.

The most common escape attempt involved running away from outdoor labour details. Some prisoners watched carefully for these opportunities, waiting for short staffing days or diversions in the form of fights and disturbances among other prisoners. In one example, two prisoners at St. Vincent de Paul in 1877 were assigned outdoor labour duties on an extremely foggy day. Working about two kilometres from the prison, Edward McMahan and Levi Joyal escaped by gradually slipping into the fog until they could not be seen.⁵⁵ Other impromptu attempts were often less successful. In June 1895 Martin Bogart attempted a casual escape from his work detail on the Kingston harbour pier. Walking to the end of the pier, he stepped off and began strolling away. Guards overtook him immediately.⁵⁶ In other instances, prisoners desiring to escape needed only to take advantage of the right opportunity. In 1893 George Gillette noticed an unlocked door as he passed through the cell block at Manitoba Penitentiary. He simply let himself out of the prison and walked to freedom across the open prairie.⁵⁷

Other escape attempts were far more elaborate and involved extensive preparation. For example, in late 1905 the warden at Kingston was notified by a prisoner that James Campbell, a convict in the lunatic asylum, was planning his escape. Campbell’s cell was searched immediately and officers discovered that his cell bars had been cut. A container of grease to conceal the cuts was found in his bed. Campbell had been escaping his cell every night with knife blades given to him by the barber, a fellow convict. His plan was to cut through the bars of the outdoor window and use a rope to swing over the outside wall.⁵⁸ Other plots involved planning and co-operation among multiple inmates as well as some ongoing deception. In 1871 three inmates, Greenbury Steele, Richard Nelligan, and Benjamin Wilson, colluded to escape from Kingston Penitentiary. Steele and Nelligan feigned sickness to gain admission to the hospital. Wilson was the convict barber and visited the hospital daily, which gave him an opportunity to smuggle a false key and an iron bar into the ward. Finally, Wilson feigned sickness and was admitted to the hospital ward. On the first stormy night after his admission, he opened all three cells. The prisoners then broke through the outside window, stole a boat from the nearby harbour, and, by morning, had escaped across the lake to New York State.⁵⁹

Escape, however, did not necessarily put prisoners out of the penitentiary’s reach. Penitentiary budgets provided substantial funds to pursue escaped inmates, expenditures that frequently entailed efforts at extradition from the United States. The most expensive pursuit of escaped prisoners occurred at Manitoba Penitentiary in 1893, when it cost $1,177.88 to recapture prisoners Gillette and Shoults.⁶⁰ Sometimes wardens went to extraordinary measures to recapture escaped prisoners. In 1876 Warden Bedson at Manitoba Penitentiary reported on the case of a convict named Daniels, a “native of the country” who slipped away from his work detail. Bedson subsequently learned that Daniels was somewhere on the shore of Lake Winnipeg and made arrangements with some “Indians and traders” to capture him, for which he supplied a set of handcuffs and the promise of a twenty-five dollar reward.⁶¹ If escaped prisoners were recaptured, they generally faced criminal charges at the next available assize. The sentence was usually an additional six months plus the loss of all remission on the original sentence. In some cases, penitentiaries did not prosecute escape attempts but instead simply punished the offender within the institution.⁶²

If escaped prisoners put enough distance between themselves and the penitentiary, they could be more assured of remaining at large. This was particularly true if they could avoid subsequent arrest in different jurisdictions. Twenty-three-year-old Leslie Cork escaped from Kingston Penitentiary in 1890 and made his way to Chicago. Warden J. M. Sullivan discovered his whereabouts when Cork boldly wrote a letter to another prisoner at Kingston bragging about his escape. Sullivan alerted the Chicago police force to be on the lookout for Cork. He reported to Inspector Moylan, “The effect of showing the other inmates here how much their chances of successful escape are lessened would be of great value.”⁶³ But Cork was not recaptured in Chicago. Kingston Penitentiary officials learned a month later, again through a letter, that Cork had surfaced in Denver. The warden wrote to the chief of police in Denver with a detailed description of the prisoner, noting, “He is a delicate looking fellow with an intelligent face and the appearance of a criminal.”⁶⁴ Apparently, Cork looked ordinary enough to avoid detection; he was never recaptured.

Complicated plots to escape usually failed because inmates informed on each other. In 1883 a prisoner at Manitoba Penitentiary informed Warden Bedson that inmates on labour detail in the basement were planning an escape. Seeking confirmation, the warden recruited another inmate whom he trusted to gather information on the plot. On the day of the outbreak, the warden had the penitentiary guards replace the bullets in their carbines with blank cartridges. Just before the time of the anticipated escape, the warden quietly locked down the prison and awaited the mutiny. As expected, the prisoners in the basement overpowered their guards, took their weapons, and headed for the exits. There they faced the entire penitentiary guard led by the warden, who rushed forward and physically overpowered the ringleader. The guards then fired their weapons, loaded with blank cartridges, and the tremendous noise frightened the escaping prisoners into submission. The ringleader later admitted that a number of prisoners had conceived of the plan at the Winnipeg gaol before they were transferred to the penitentiary.⁶⁵ In a similar situation, the warden at Kingston was less eager to personally engage in physical combat to prevent escape. After learning of a plot to mutiny and break free from the workshops, the warden applied for assistance from the Department of Militia. Fifty men of “A” Battery were silently marched into the penitentiary in the middle of the night. The following day, the soldiers were paraded in the yard, which had an unnerving effect on the prisoners. The escape attempt was abandoned.⁶⁶

In their response to escape, penitentiary officials often resorted to particular constructions of criminality that cast escaping individuals as the most “desperate” of all prisoners. In part, this construction rested on the fact that escape was particularly difficult and many attempts were in fact desperate and irrational. But it also characterized escaping prisoners as particularly dangerous and unpredictable, a description that helped to justify the violence and the frequent use of firearms that accompanied escape attempts in the post-Confederation era. These constructions were similar to those connected to corporal punishment in this era, playing on the “brutality” and “inhumanity” of incorrigible inmates to justify violent responses, as we will see in a later discussion.

Guns were a common feature of penitentiary life. Revolvers were issued to guards and keepers at all institutions, and the boundaries of the penitentiaries were protected by guards armed with rifles and carbines. At Manitoba Penitentiary, Warden Bedson described his state of preparedness for potential escape in his 1875 report: “My turnkeys when in charge of convicts outside the yard are armed with repeating carbines, slung over their shoulder, and a revolver and a pair of handcuffs…. I instruct them in rifle and revolver practice, my object in doing so is to accustom them (should it be necessary) in firing at a run-away convict, to maim him and not kill.”⁶⁷ Given the open spaces that surrounded most penitentiaries, gunfire was the most reliable method of stopping fleeing convicts. In 1871 James McCarron, a prisoner at St. John Penitentiary, crossed the penitentiary fence and started to run. According to the warden, two “‘buck shots,’ one in the left arm, the other in the right side of the back … effectively checked his progress.” Warden Quinton noted that McCarron was not seriously injured by receiving these “small missives from the penitentiary guard.”⁶⁸ In the following decades, however, other institutions employed more powerful weaponry.

Christopher Murray was the first prisoner to be killed while attempting to escape from Kingston Penitentiary. In November 1869 Murray slipped from his cell with another prisoner, making his way to an outside door. A guard called on the men to surrender, and when they continued, he fired on them with his revolver. Another guard finally apprehended Murray, who said, “Do not fire, I have had enough.” He then fell and died. As would become customary in such killings, a coroner’s jury declared the shooting “justifiable homicide.”⁶⁹ This incident deeply shook both the convicts and penitentiary staff; it seemed to shatter a calm and place the entire institution on edge. The penitentiary directors ordered that additional patrols be made of all the cell blocks. The night guards were instructed to inspect each cell before the lights went down and to make certain that the “day clothes of every convict are hanging upon the pegs in his cell.”⁷⁰ The unease throughout the institution worried the penitentiary directors, who felt that it could explode into something more dangerous. As they reported in the aftermath of the shooting, “There exists a very uneasy and dangerous feeling among the convicts—or at any rate among many of them which may gradually subside but which may also exhibit itself in some violent and sudden act of insubordination.” The report went on to note that “the Directors have for some time past felt with alarm that the efficient control of the prison has passed from the hands to which the law confides it and that no other hand has taken it.”⁷¹

The “unease” the directors spoke about became a constant state of affairs at Kingston Penitentiary in the years that followed. Guns played no small part in this development. The killing of convicts was deeply upsetting to the rest of the prisoners, and Murray’s death in 1869 was not the only incident in the post-Confederation era. Other escaping convicts were gunned down as they fled on foot. In 1877, for example, Thomas Sholvin was killed while escaping from St. John Penitentiary. After he crossed the wall with a twelve-foot plank, the guards fired on him with rifles as he fled toward the woods.⁷²

Was the killing of escaping convicts justifiable? Most wardens in the penitentiary service believed that it was. A provision in the 1851 Penitentiary Act stated, “If any officer should in the attempt to prevent the escape of any convict take the life of such convict, such officer will not be held responsible.”⁷³ In fact, efforts to stop escapes by all available means were encouraged: the 1851 legislation stated that a sum of fifty pounds could be levied as a reward for the apprehension of fleeing convicts. In the later nineteenth century, this sum was occasionally paid as a reward to the guard who successfully shot an escaping prisoner. Predictably, Inspector Moylan was the lone voice of doubt about both the legality and morality of taking an inmate’s life to prevent escape. In 1883 he wrote that prison officers “are very culpable if through their negligence or carelessness convicts have the chance of running away, and they are still more culpable if they kill or maim the unfortunate being who takes advantage of their dereliction of duty. However jurists may regard the killing of a prisoner, under such circumstances, the interpreters of ‘higher law,’—theologians—would define it to be a crime not far removed from murder.”⁷⁴ Thus, Moylan stressed the responsibility that weighed on penitentiary officials and guards with respect to the lives of prisoners. By the end of the century, the Department of Justice was taking a slightly more cautious approach to the shooting of escaping prisoners. Referencing Joseph Gabbett’s 1835 Treatise on Criminal Law, the department concluded that a fleeing convict could only be killed in the event that he could not be overtaken by less drastic measures. If that possibility did exist and the convict was still killed, the shooting was to be regarded at least as manslaughter.⁷⁵ But no penitentiary officer who fired on an escaping prisoner was ever charged. It was generally accepted that without the threat of firearms, escape attempts would occur far more frequently.

Rumours in penitentiaries could be powerful, affecting both prisoners and keepers alike. In 1883 a rumour swept through St. Vincent de Paul that penitentiary guards did not possess the legal authority to fire their weapons at escaping prisoners. The idea became so entrenched that in the winter of 1883, a number of prisoners planned an escape simply to test whether the guards would fire. Learning of the escape plot five days before it occurred, the guards, keepers, and warden all seemed unsure about using their weapons.⁷⁶ When five prisoners finally attempted escape, the guards fired on them, wounding two and killing twenty-three-year-old J. B. Deragon.⁷⁷ Deragon was one of six prisoners to be killed escaping from penitentiaries between 1867 and 1900. James McCabe, who was shot two days after escaping, could be considered the seventh death.⁷⁸ At least eight other prisoners were seriously wounded by gunfire during escape attempts in this period. One of the effects of concerns about escape was to entrench firearms in the daily routines of penitentiary practice as a consistent acknowledgement of the threat posed by the penitentiary population. In some cases, the use of firearms resulted in tragedy, as with prisoner George Hewell at Kingston Penitentiary, discussed in detail in the final chapter.

MUTINY AND RIOT

Penitentiary officials worked to prevent escape, but they did not especially fear it. What they feared was the possibility of a convict uprising, a threat that helped to justify drastic disciplinary measures and corporal punishment in the early years of Kingston Penitentiary. In the post-1850 era, though punishment became less severe, officials still felt the dread of a riot. Throughout the century, isolated incidents illustrated the potential for uprising. Of all the inmates at Kingston Penitentiary, perhaps none were more accustomed to resistance and uprising than the members of the Fenian Brotherhood. After unsuccessful raids into New Brunswick and the Niagara Peninsula in April 1866, twenty-five American Fenians were given capital sentences, which were subsequently commuted to life imprisonment.⁷⁹ Some of the prisoners were sentenced to provincial prisons, but eventually, all of the Fenian prisoners were moved to Kingston due to fears that members of the brotherhood might cross the border again to attempt a rescue.⁸⁰ Penitentiary officials at Kingston regarded the Fenians as some of the most difficult and insubordinate inmates the prison had ever seen.

In October 1868, Fenian Thomas Quinn was working on the stone pile when he put down his tools and refused to continue. When guard Allan Grant ordered him back to work, Quinn replied, “Report me for God’s sake, I wish you would! I will withstand any punishment that may be inflicted on me if you report me and thereby prove your loyalty.”⁸¹ Grant submitted a disciplinary report and Quinn was brought before Warden Macdonell the next morning to explain himself. Upon hearing the guard read the disciplinary report to the warden, Quinn became enraged and attacked Grant, pummelling him in the face before the guards restrained him. Outbursts of this kind in the presence of senior officers were exceedingly rare. Macdonell was stunned. He sentenced Quinn to five dozen lashes with the cat-o’-nine-tails—an unusually harsh punishment—and sent him to the dungeon in chains.

The events that followed convinced the penitentiary officers that Quinn’s attack was part of a plot by the Fenian prisoners to mutiny against the penitentiary. While Quinn was still in the warden’s office, the news of his impending punishment spread to the dining hall, where the prisoners were eating breakfast. If there was no preconceived plot, what followed is a testament to the speed of covert communication among the prisoners. As Quinn was being taken past the hall, he whistled loudly, and a group of Fenians sprang to their feet. A guard rose, demanding to know what was happening. Prisoner William Hayden shouted, “I am going to see that that man gets fair play!” From across the hall, John Gallagher cried, “Here is one! Here is one!” Prisoners Michael Purtette and Evan Kennedy were also on their feet, and one of them yelled, “I will not sit down to see my comrade flogged!” Fearing that the Fenians meant to rescue Quinn, the guards drew their service revolvers and threatened to shoot if the men would not return to their seats. “Shoot away and be damned!” Purtette shouted as he slashed at a guard with his table knife. Guards from throughout the prison poured into the dining room, and the Fenians were quickly overpowered and dragged to the punishment cells in the basement.⁸²

Warden Macdonell made an example out of what he called “the mutineers.” Each of the men was whipped twenty-four times except for Gallagher, who received thirty-six lashes.⁸³ The outburst and the response by officials hinted at the growing anxiety in the post-Confederation era about the explosive potential of the dangerous elements in the penitentiary population. Although criminality and incorrigibility were sometimes individual constructions, events like the Fenian mutiny supported the persistent fear that the worst qualities of incorrigibility might be writ large across the entire penitentiary population. In these instances, the dangerous classes actually became physically threatening, demonstrating their terrifying potential.

The threat of riot and mutiny prompted specific changes in penal practice. In 1881 Inspector Moylan noted that the dinner hour was inherently threatening, as “no time of the day is more favourable for an outbreak in an institution, when the convicts are massed together in all their full strength.” Furthermore, the dining halls furnished prisoners with knives and forks, which, according to Moylan, could be converted into “formidable and effective weapons.”⁸⁴ In fact, prisoners had always fashioned weapons from all sorts of materials throughout the penitentiary, particularly when they had access to machine and carpentry shops. Knives and “shanks” were common items of contraband discovered in personal and cell searches. In the 1880s, officials fixated on mealtimes as a particular site of potential danger. By 1884 British Columbia and Manitoba had both eliminated communal meals, and the men were fed in individual cells. Going a step further, at the turn of the century, St. Vincent de Paul eliminated cutlery from the penitentiary altogether with the exception of very blunt spoons. After observing the prisoners tearing at their food with their hands and teeth, the surgeon argued that such restrictions only further degraded the prisoners, “placing them on an equal footing to the brute.”⁸⁵ In spite of the increasing precautions to prevent violent uprisings, such outbursts were actually difficult to predict or prevent. This left penitentiary officials in a constant state of anxiety and preparedness for the worst possible outcome.

ST. VINCENT DE PAUL

It is somewhat surprising that the penitentiary system was not wracked with more examples of prisoners rising up against their keepers. On the one hand, this could be attributed to the draconian discipline that prevailed even after the reforms of the 1850s and 1860s. On the other hand, the same reforms made penitentiary life bearable enough to prevent widespread rebellion among prison populations. Thus, it is remarkable that the scene of the only large-scale penitentiary riots in the post-Confederation era was at St. Vincent de Paul, where the exploitation and indifference of the staff nullified and subverted the path of reform. In the process, the institution became unwieldy and difficult to manage, and the prison population grew increasingly violent and rebellious. The history of riot at St. Vincent de Paul illustrates how mismanagement and exploitation could lead to widespread resistance and violence.

The troubling events at St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary took place over the course of a decade and were bookended by two riots. Between 1887 and 1897, the regime of Warden Télesphore Ouimet resulted in corruption that overshadowed even the early years of Kingston Penitentiary under Henry Smith. A Royal Commission called to investigate the conditions at St. Vincent de Paul was staffed by James Noxon, O. K. Fraser, and D. A. Lafortune. With eight thousand pages of testimony, the commission detailed the troubled years between 1887 and 1897. Ouimet had an inauspicious beginning in the penitentiary service. He was hired at St. Vincent de Paul as a farming instructor in 1870 but was soon demoted to the position of guard when officials discovered he had no knowledge of farming and was illiterate. Unhappy with the demotion, Ouimet left the prison soon after but returned in 1879, when he was hired as clerk of works. Investigators in the late 1890s were unable to explain how Ouimet obtained this position given his extremely limited abilities. It is clear that he had friends on the inside of the penitentiary service. The commission’s report cited “strong influences behind him by which he attained to positions.”⁸⁶ Ouimet’s friends must have been powerful indeed, for his ascent through the penitentiary ranks was startling. In 1881 he was made deputy warden, a position he filled for five years until the first revolt.

Echoing the power struggles among the top penitentiary officials in Kingston’s early years, Deputy Warden Ouimet carried out a campaign against St. Vincent de Paul’s warden, Godfrey Lavoilette. Ouimet began disregarding orders given by the warden and neglected to submit his disciplinary recommendations through the warden’s office. This insubordination split the penitentiary staff: those in a disciplinary role gave their allegiance to Ouimet and the warden became isolated. Much of the staff believed that Ouimet would become the next warden of the penitentiary and were reluctant to cross him. Thus, the keepers adopted an open ambivalence toward Lavoilette’s authority. The Royal Commission noted that the effect of this struggle was to completely destabilize security in the penitentiary: “When there is no united action on the part of officers, vigilance and discipline are relaxed. Next, escapes and even mutinies are planned, for convicts quickly perceive the existence of contentions between those placed on guard over them, and are not slow to turn such quarrels to their own account” (49). This dark prediction came to pass in early 1886. With the balance of power at St. Vincent de Paul badly destabilized by the struggle between Lavoilette and Ouimet, a group of prisoners planned a bold escape. The commissioners were distressed to discover evidence that Ouimet played no small role in allowing the revolt to happen. In the days leading up to the “dreaded revolt,” Ouimet was absent from his duties without leave. This created a “premonition” throughout the institution that something terrible was about to happen.

On the morning of April 24, while Ouimet was praying in the penitentiary chapel, violence erupted in the stonework department. Eight ringleaders suddenly overpowered their guards, disarmed them, and bound them with cords. The attack was well coordinated: at the same time, the work gangs in the tailor and shoe shops all rose against their keepers. Rushing into the prison yard, the stone shed gang raised a ladder against the southeastern wall and some men began to ascend. Tower guards on either side of the yard fired on the escaping convicts with rifles, and the farm instructor rushed to the opposite side of the wall and fired his rifle. Two of the prisoners were wounded by the first burst of gunfire, and the rest retreated back into the prison yard. There they intercepted Warden Lavoilette, and the prisoners used him as a shield against the gunfire of the tower guards. They demanded that the western gate be opened, but the warden called to the tower guards to fire again on the prisoners. Gunfire erupted from the towers and the warden was shot in the back of the neck. As he staggered away, he was shot twice more with a revolver by one of the prisoners before collapsing. He was then carried into the main building by a group of stunned prisoners. The riot ended. Prisoner Joseph Corriveau lay dead, and the remaining rioters dispersed and returned to their cells with the rest of the prisoners as the muster bell sounded across the empty penitentiary yard.

It took ten years for the truth about the revolt to enter the public record. During the Royal Commission investigation in 1897, it became clear that Ouimet had lured the warden into a deadly situation. In his testimony, Lavoilette stated, “I have reason to be astonished, nor can I even to-day understand why, during the revolt in the yard, and while I was alone facing these insurgent malefactors of whom eight or ten were around me with revolvers; why, I say, a superior officer did not enter the yard at the head of a detachment of ten or twelve guards armed with rifles and revolvers. A considerable number of officers remained inactive in the Keeper’s Hall” (Royal Commission, 53). These revelations did not surface in the aftermath of the revolt. Lavoilette was relieved of his position to recover from his gunshot wounds: his jaw had been shattered by the first revolver shot. Ouimet became the acting authority for the rest of 1886, and in 1887 he was made permanent warden of St. Vincent de Paul. The following decade was marked by staggering corruption and exploitation. The 1886 riot and the events of the decade that followed illustrate the delicate balance in the relationships between prisoners and keepers that sustained power relations in a penitentiary at that time. In stark contrast to a restrictive and draconian regime such as Samuel Bedson’s at Manitoba, the penitentiary under Ouimet brought prisoners and keepers into a more mutually beneficial and opportunistic relationship. The decade of turbulence illustrated the utter inefficiency of penitentiary governance under the penitentiary inspector’s office. Though he was present for yearly visits, Inspector Moylan made no comment throughout the decade on the corruption in Ouimet’s administration. It is impossible to know if he was complicit or simply unaware of the extent of the illegal activity at St. Vincent de Paul.

The most serious corruptions under Ouimet’s regimes were financial. Under the warden’s watch, an underground economy developed throughout the penitentiary in which both prisoners and keepers participated. While a number of officials at St. Vincent de Paul were implicated in financial corruption and mismanagement, the investigating commissioners were most outraged at the extent of convict participation in this economy. A permissive atmosphere allowed certain factions of inmates to completely take control of many areas of the prison economy, both official and underground. Soon after Ouimet took command of the penitentiary, the prisoners employed in the stonework department—the same gang who had initiated the 1886 revolt—turned the department into a capital enterprise for their own profit. The inmates running the scheme obtained “inventory” by creating waste from the raw material provided to the penitentiary. It was penitentiary policy to sell waste stone to outside buyers, but the prisoners controlled these contracts. While dressing a stone, a prisoner would remark, “This will make a good corporation stone,” before striking off a corner and spoiling the block for the purposes of construction (Royal Commission, 6). The waste stone was then sold to the highest bidder. Creating waste stone worked to the convicts’ advantage as it kept a steady supply of new stone flowing into the penitentiary. The stone was supplied to the penitentiary for various projects, among them the construction of a more secure boundary wall. In 1897 the commissioners were appalled to discover that the penitentiary had paid for $65,000 worth of stone that had not ended up in the penitentiary wall. The prisoners also managed to slow the speed of construction by resorting to a tacit system of “convict rights” by which their work was governed. This was an unspoken agreement between prisoners and keepers that the stonework gang would control the production of their department, deciding which projects they were willing to work on. The penitentiary wall fell into the category of “legitimate” projects, but other requests made of their department were subject to outrageous delays.

The penitentiary administration was complicit in this underground economy. Acting as a banker, the prison accountant accepted cash payments from outside contractors for the stone and held these funds in reserve for the prisoners in the stonework department. The prisoners could then draw on these funds to purchase luxuries or favours from penitentiary staff, and when a member of the department was released from the penitentiary, the accountant would pay out his share in cash (Royal Commission, 6). The stonework department also had direct access to outside suppliers of sundries and groceries—contraband goods that were then trafficked to the rest of the inmates and sold at grossly inflated prices. However, the stoneworkers were not the only such suppliers in the penitentiary. They competed with the prisoners in the pumphouse, who likewise had contact with outside wholesalers and formed a rival trafficking business. The pumphouse group specialized in groceries, supplying butter, ham, eggs, and tobacco to the rest of the institution. Other businesses also flourished within the penitentiary walls. For example, the commissioners discovered a fully functioning printing press operating in the prison’s clothing storage room. It was owned by an inmate, who was allowed to accept contracts from outside customers in exchange for providing free printing services to the penitentiary administration (16).

Unsurprisingly, corrupt officers were at the top of this illicit financial network. The prisoners were merely the beneficiaries of a system that funnelled profit and gain into the hands of penitentiary officers. The prison officers regularly sold livestock, milk, vegetables, and other goods to the penitentiary under assumed names or on behalf of relatives and then profited from the inflated prices on these goods. Some prison officers traded tobacco and fruit for clothing produced by the penitentiary tailor shops (17). The stonecutting department ran a steady trade in tombstones and garden monuments, for which they were paid in cash and groceries. The clerk of works took advantage of the stone department by procuring the material to build two houses, paying a total of twelve dollars (18). Warden Ouimet also enriched himself in various ways, the most glaring of which was the sale of three horses to the prison that he had purchased for a very minor sum. In the end, the farmer from whom he was buying the dilapidated animals refused to have any further dealings with the warden (17).

The permissive atmosphere at St. Vincent de Paul also bred distressing exploitation of the prisoners. One of the worst examples concerned the utter disregard for basic prisoner rights with regard to the incoming and outgoing mail. The commissioners reported that “the prison officials responsible for the carrying out of this branch of work have been as callous in their treatment of the unfortunates under their charge as they well could be. During the whole term of office of the present warden and his clerk, the negligence manifested in this connection has been nothing short of criminal” (11). The commissioners discovered a troubling fact that implicated Inspector Moylan in the ruinous administration, or at least pointed to his complicity. When Moylan announced his retirement from the Inspector’s Office in 1895, it was reported that Ouimet began systematically burning the records of St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary. Thousands of documents, registers, and letters were destroyed. What distressed the commissioners the most was testimony suggesting that among these documents were hundreds and possibly thousands of letters to and from prisoners that the penitentiary had amassed over the decade. The commissioners’ suspicions seemed confirmed when they inspected the institution and found still thousands more letters in the warden’s vault. The vast majority of these were opened. In the clerk’s office, the commissioners found a huge collection of Bibles, crucifixes, personal effects, bank notes, and remittances that officials had confiscated from the mail. Among the letters were petitions for clemency addressed to the governor general, the Department of Justice, and various other government officials. In the course of testimony before the commission, it was determined that any prisoner who had complained to the administration about the non-delivery of mail had been brutally punished. When St. Vincent de Paul officials were questioned before the commission about this exploitation, they cited only “carelessness.” In their report, the commissioners wrote emotionally about the gravity of the exploitation the prisoners had suffered:

There is nothing perhaps to which the average convict … attaches more importance than the correspondence, restricted though it be, which passes between them and the relatives or friends outside. It is the only legitimate mode of communication with the outer world…. Apart from the convict himself, only those who stand by and witness the eagerness with which he receives and peruses the messages from his wife, the mother or the child, as the case may be, can fully realize all that such a message means to the unfortunate behind bars, and only the convict can feel the loss which follows the break in the chain of correspondence they strive to maintain. No one should be more impressed with this condition of convict life than those whose duty it is to inspect and deliver all the correspondence coming and going between the prisoners and those with whom they are in communication. (11)

Warden Ouimet was fired in 1897. In his place, Charles Foster, the warden at Dorchester, took temporary control of the penitentiary and attempted to regain control of the institution. Foster’s first measure was the total prohibition of all tobacco products from the penitentiary. This disrupted the exchange economy and absolutely enraged the prisoners. One former prisoner interviewed in the press claimed it was “almost impossible for some of the old tobacco-users to do without tobacco. They would rather do without a meal then have it taken from them.”⁸⁷ The prisoners did not suffer silently. On September 15, the convicts “started in on a preconcerted signal to howl and continued to raise a perfect bedlam until late at night.”⁸⁸ Fearing a widespread revolt during daily labour, all work was cancelled and the convicts kept in “lockdown,” which meant continual confinement in their cells. Thirty-six of the most dangerous prisoners were placed in solitary confinement. The following night, the prisoners continued their “howling” to such an extent that one report stated that the nearby villagers were absolutely panic-stricken by the sound of it. “Mark my word,” warned the ex-convict interviewed by The Globe, “you will see a hot time at the pen before long.”⁸⁹

Convinced that the officials at St. Vincent de Paul faced an overwhelming situation, the Department of Justice ordered a squad of Dominion Police to the penitentiary to prepare for a possible revolt. Some guards, apparently still loyal to the former warden, tipped the prisoners to the awaiting force of Dominion Police, and this ignited new protest. Penitentiary Inspector Stewart acted swiftly, suspending Chief Keeper Thomas McCarthy on suspicion of stoking the protest of the prisoners. On the fourth night of protest, the penitentiary officers turned water hoses on the howling prisoners and, in the days following, regained control of the situation. Eight of the “ringleaders” of the riot were transferred from St. Vincent de Paul to the Prison of Isolation at Kingston, thus removing the most dangerous elements of the prison population. However, the convicts continued their agitation throughout the fall of 1897, allegedly aided by the instigation of three guards remaining loyal to Ouimet. On Christmas Day 1897, the inmates recommenced their howling protest and were locked down again over the Christmas holidays. As a result, the traditional distribution of Christmas delicacies was suspended, causing the outbreak of additional riot and insubordination.⁹⁰

The disturbance was finally subdued when Foster, the acting warden, requested permission from the Justice minister to take “drastic action” and employ corporal punishment. Six of the incorrigible inmates were identified and whipped in front of the entire penitentiary population.⁹¹ This ended the year of riot at St. Vincent de Paul. The fact that it ended with hosing prisoners down like animals and brutalizing them into submission with the whip was a sobering warning of the frightening potential of the penitentiary’s dangerous classes.

The exploitation and corruption at St. Vincent de Paul stemmed from the willful pursuit of power by penitentiary staff loyal to Warden Ouimet. It demonstrated the remarkable effect that the corruption of a few individuals could have over the entire institution. In fact, similar scandals surfaced in almost every penitentiary in Canada at some point in the nineteenth century, and they were frequently linked with one or two disruptive penitentiary officials. In the late 1880s, a political scandal erupted over the conduct of James Fitzsimmons, the deputy warden at British Columbia Penitentiary. In 1889 an ex-convict of British Columbia distributed a “fly-sheet” in Washington State containing a list of serious charges against the administration at the penitentiary. It singled out Fitzsimmons specifically. A copy of the sheet was obtained by the Daily Columbian and eventually circulated among British Columbian representatives in Ottawa, including Senator Donald McInnes. The Department of Justice investigated but found no evidence of wrongdoing, and the matter was dropped.

In 1893 rumours again surfaced about gross mismanagement at British Columbia and pointed at Fitzsimmons. The Justice Department initiated another investigation, which revealed troubling financial irregularities connected to the deputy warden. Worse, Justice Drake reported to the government that Fitzsimmons had waged a war of attrition against Warden James McBride, attempting for years to undermine his authority and speed his resignation. Fitzsimmons was suspended, but within a year, McBride resigned. In a move that enraged the members of the House of Commons from British Columbia, Fitzsimmons was reinstated. McInnes marshalled the British Columbian representatives to demand a solution, and Fitzsimmons was finally transferred to Manitoba Penitentiary, where he assumed the position of deputy warden. The political masters in Ottawa were most enraged by reports of financial corruption. Lost in this debate was evidence about the exploitation of the prison population under Fitzsimmons’s authority.

After the deputy warden’s departure from British Columbia Penitentiary, some of the details about his regime were made more public. The prisoners looked upon his departure with absolute relief. Although Justice Drake had interviewed prisoners in the course of his investigation, it was clear that no convict would risk speaking out against the deputy while he still held his position. After his move to Manitoba in 1894, the prisoners talked. In the “Discharged Convict Question and Answer Book,” the memory of Fitzsimmons’s reign at the penitentiary surfaces repeatedly. The answers of several inmates paint a picture of an exploitative and brutally insensitive disciplinary regime under the former deputy warden. Question three of the standard interview form asked, “Have you ever seen any cruel treatment inflicted upon the prisoners, and what is your opinion generally upon the manner in which convicts are treated?”⁹² Prior to June 1894, no prisoner had been willing to answer this question. In all likelihood, Fitzsimmons himself had conducted the interview. After his departure, the prisoners were bolder. “Some are treated well, others are treated like brutes,” was one response. Another replied, “Pretty badly treated in the past by guards and officials.” Another prisoner singled out the new warden, John Foster, directly: “Appeared in a very humane manner, but previous to your arrival, very brutally.” One prisoner even gave a detailed response that implicated Fitzsimmons directly: “Yes. In my opinion No. 399 Cary Jones was hastened into his grave by being compelled to work whilst totally unfit also it was a decided act of cruelty to refrain from taking the leg-irons off No. 403 McCabe until within a few days of his death. These and other cruelties happened prior to June 1894 and under the regime of McBride and Fitzsimmons. Since June 1894 the treatment of the convicts has been humane and proper.”⁹³

Scandals like the Ouimet or Fitzsimmons affairs both illustrate the distance between the reform vision and the penitentiary system created in Canada in the nineteenth century. Was there a discernible difference between the early corruption at Kingston investigated by Brown and the state of affairs in the 1880s and 1890s? How did incompetent and abusive penitentiary officials persist at their posts for years on end? Was the inspector of penitentiaries too absent or did he possess so little power and influence that corruption existed in spite of him? What is clear is that penitentiaries in Canada near the end of the century had more in common with their early history than officials and reformers were prepared to admit.

In practice, then, the penitentiary was a complex social system over which reform discourses exerted relatively little influence. Day-to-day life within prison walls was a reflection, above all, of the balance of power between keepers and prisoners. Even as reformers attempted to influence the overall structure and terms of the relationship between prison authorities and inmates, it continued to be shaped by the particular patterns of power that lay at the heart of the institution—power that was expressed in ways that were often ambiguous and not necessarily apparent to outsiders and that generally deviated from the reform vision. Reformers were often unable to grasp the degree to which prisoners played an active role in configuring these relations of power. Thus, as I suggest above, the broader trajectory of reform was subverted by individual transgressions and acts of resistance of the sort that marked the daily intercourse of power in penitentiary life.