Kingston Penitentiary’s planned closure brings spotlight on almost two centuries of history

Kingston Penitentiary looks like Hollywood's idea of a prison; high stone walls, menacing guard towers, imposing Victorian buildings.

It's Canada's San Quentin, Alcatraz and Sing-Sing rolled into one.

It's hard to believe the Kingston Pen — which the government announced this week will be closing in two years — was considered at the leading edge of penal science when it opened in 1835, more than three decades before Confederation.

Charles Dickens, who visited in 1842, called the prison "an admirable gaol, well and wisely governed, and excellently regulated in every respect," as quoted in Canadian Literary Landmarks.

Incarceration was evolving from merely punishing criminals towards trying to reform them. Dickens noted prisoners were engaged in meaningful jobs such as shoemaking, stonecutting, cabinetry and blacksmithing. Women prisoners did needlework.

But the prison was the furthest thing from a comfortable place to ease wrongdoers back into society.

The Toronto Star notes Peter H. Hennessy's book Canada's Big House: The Dark History of Kingston Penitentiary, describes the cells as being "like mail slots for human bodies."

The cells weren't enlarged until the 20th century, when they also got electric light and running water.

And despite the emphasis on trades training, Kingston Pen remained a place for "confining, isolating, punishing and stigmatizing criminals," Hennessy wrote. The slightest rule infraction brought punishment.

Prison conditions spawned major riots in 1932 and 1971, the latter lasting four days, with six guards taken hostage and two inmates killed. It was ended only with help from the military. An inquiry report blamed it on "the aged physical facilities, over-crowding, shortage of professional staff."

"It's a blessing that it's finally going to be closed," Hennessy told the Kingston Whig-Standard.

"It should have happened a long time ago. It ceased to have any practical utility as long ago as the 1971 riot."

Kingston Pen was perhaps best known as the home of some of Canada's most dangerous criminals.

Notorious killers Clifford Olson, Paul Bernardo, Col. Russell Williams and other violent offenders were among its infamous inmates, many of them in the prison's segregation unit.

Globe and Mail legal reporter Kirk Makin recalled Friday a 1989 visit to visit E Block, whose residents are kept in their cells 23 hours a day.

"With its population of 31 reviled convicts — killers, bombers, serial rapists and a long-forgotten airplane hijacker — E Block was the home to the worst of the worst," Makin wrote Friday.

He was allowed to walk around freely and talk with any prisoner, his escort told him.

"Just don't get too close to the bar; killers who have no hope of release are liable to do just about anything," Makin was warned.

In the "three most surreal hours of my career," Makin's encounters included Olson, who was excited to see a reporter after years of trying to contact one.

"Like a crazed monkey, he leapt from the floor to his cot and back again with remarkable agility. 'I've been trying to get to you guys for years!' "

In another visit he interviewed Guy Paul Morin in 1992, sent to Kingston two months earlier after being convicted of the child sex-slaying of neighbour Christine Jessop. He would eventually be exonerated but Makin recalled just a few weeks in Kingston Pen had changed Morin dramatically.

The once happy-go-lucky Morin, certain of acquittal, had been "transformed into a visibly frightened captive of a prison culture," Makin recalled.

Kingston Penitentiary was declared a national historic site in the 1990s and it's not clear what will become of it now.

"It will be an interesting experience in ingenuity and planning to put the old institution to use," Hennessy told the Whig-Standard.

"They shouldn't level it or blast it to hell. That would be a terrible mistake."

Among his suggestions, turn it into a museum and tourist attraction, like San Francisco's Alcatraz, or perhaps transform it into the strangest bed and breakfast in the world.

(CP photo)