I had driven by the Kingston Penitentiary many times back in the day, often referred to as “Canada’s Alcatraz”. Each time those stark foreboding limestone walls made me wonder what really took place inside. Would the folklore of the guards being big bullies and the prisoners ready to slit someone’s throat in a flash be the case? Sometimes I felt empathy for the inmates with no choice but to fill so many of their years behind bars, at other times the heinous crimes committed made me wish those inmates should be strung up! Now I was about to get a tour inside the 178-year-old muzzled walls that still retained the thousands of memories of utter despair and improbable hope.
The tour was well organized and especially interesting when former guards that worked at KP revealed notorious tales of the prison’s history. The main dome was the central focus with its levels of cell blocks known as cell ranges stretching out in spider-like fashion. On the floor in the middle was an igloo-style fortress; guards always on watch while cradling their weapons. This was the reality of prison life they spun, orderliness, routine and calmness 99 percent of the time, but the atmosphere exuded an intimately scary sense of being trapped. Within this imposing main dome, an ex-guard of KP described the worst riot ever experienced. It was 1971 and it saw six guards held hostage for four harrowing days. Two ‘undesirable” inmate deaths were the result of beatings by the rioters. Several parts of the prison were so badly damaged in the riot that they never reopened. Riots in prisons were a big portion of the folklore on the outside.
Our tour moved on to the E-block where the sexual offenders, the worst of the worst, were held in segregation fashioning a mood of inherent nervousness in most visitors. Prisoners on this range, including Paul Bernardo, were locked in their cells 23 hours a day, never allowed to speak a word in conversation. I lived at Warden and Steeles, Scarborough, in the late 1980’s and to think that was when Paul Bernardo was earning his reputation as The Scarborough Rapist — only blocks from where I resided. I’m lucky I wasn’t a cross-dresser back then like I was for the recent Spring Fling in the Westmeath Hall. We weren’t allowed to enter this range but peering through the steel gate, I could see the cells where the infamous club that had once lived in the protective custody range; Michael Briere, Russell Williams, Clifford Olson and many others. For them, protective custody was a godsend. The cells were empty now but I could sense the ghosts of an evil presence emanating from them. If only the walls could talk – what stories and secrets they could reveal. My cousin Michael, a student at Queens U, got permission once to interview Saul Betesh in his cell, one of the shoeshine-boy killers.
Massive stone buildings made up administration offices, a hospital, a psychiatric facility, a gymnasium, a vocational shop and an impressive housing section for overnight family visits. Food costs were paid for by the inmates who earned a minimum of $1 a day up to $6.25. The prison also had a chapel, school and library. A black steel door was the entrance to the prison school. Inmates up to a certain age were compelled to upgrade their educational skills. Also, there was the separate aboriginal prison area and an adjoining bare ground still with a teepee in the centre of it that had hosted their celebrations of culture.
A long-term segregation range was for safety of prisoners not able to fit into the general population and was wide open for examination. The two-story cells were left as they were at KP’s closing with artwork and graffiti still on the walls. The ex-guard at that station explained, “It took a staff person his whole shift to paint over what was scribbled on the walls each day.” Some men were in long-term isolation by choice. The individual cells were rather cramped containing only the basics as one expected.
The isolation unit wasn’t dark covered holes chiseled out of the ground like imagined, but a hallway of about two dozen cells used for disciplinary reasons, usually for a few days to a month and mostly for aggressive behaviour. Again, open for viewing: those inmates had been under the strictest of surveillance. Permanent handcuffs were attached for the ready on every cell. There were other signs too, signifying the seriousness of security. Meticulous records of behaviour adjustments were kept.
One thing on the tour that struck me as too harsh was punishments for the children within KP’s walls in the early years. Antoine Beauche was the youngest at eight, given a three-year sentence in 1845 for burglary.
Bank robber Tyrone Conn, who had already escaped from three other prisons before arriving, got over KP’s 10-metre perimeter fence one night in 1999 by using a hand-made ladder and grappling hook he constructed in the prison shop. Two weeks later he was tracked to a basement apartment in Toronto. He accidentally shot himself during the standoff or at least that was the official explanation. Many felt it was suicide rather than to go back inside for a much longer term. I visualized him being portrayed as an amiable scoundrel.
The federal government shut down the prison as a cost-saving measure and the complex has been designated as a National Historic Site of Canada. The impression gleaned from the storytellers on my tour was resentment that their preferred place of employment was terminated without a moment’s notice. As a group, they strongly believed that the Kingston Penitentiary should be and was suited to be functioning to this very day. I wonder too why such a well-organized facility in good working shape would go into default. What a waste!
Upon exit from the penitentiary, I glanced back and thought, the tour wasn’t what I expected. Sure, terrible atrocities meant jail-time and carnages even occurred inside KP, but except for the sensational rare events, prison life carried on routinely and safely. At least that’s the impression the tour itself meant to convey!
