es and bits of wire, but most of the time this was unsuccessful, assuming suicide was even their objective.
One inmate at Kingston Penitentiary decided to hatch an escape plan that would have almost certainly resulted in him being shot by a prison guard when he would attempt to scale the perimeter wall. However, that plan failed, and the inmate requested a transfer to British Columbia. Shortly after, he provoked a number of inmates until one of them stabbed him multiple times in the chest, arms, and abdomen. He was again unsuccessful.
Prison inmates, however, are not the only members of Kingston Penitentiary to commit suicide. By March of 2001, three Kingston-area prison guards had already committed suicide, shortly after an RCMP investigation into a staff-supported drug-smuggling ring began. The police probe began looking into the smuggling of cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy, and alcohol, but no charges were immediately laid. Only a month after the investigation, 50 year-old prison guard Geoffrey McConnell feared he would be implicated in the smuggling plot, and killed himself in the parking lot of Bath Institution. He had driven to the prison, asked a fellow guard there to lend him his pistol, then walked to his car and fired a fatal shot into his brain. Later, in 2000, prison guards Gail Perkins and David Perkins took their own lives, as well. (The Globe and Mail, 22 March 2001)
On April 12, 1990, Richard Veinotte killed himself on April 12. With a rope he had fashioned from a canvas-bag obtained in the prison's canvas shop, he hanged himself over the frame of the top-bed bunk in his cell.
Another inmate, serving a life-sentence for second-degree murder, died in October of 1993, along with a string of other suicides at Millhaven and Warkworth, all within a week of each other. Following the victim's suicide, there were recommendations that Kingston Penitentiary set up an emergency phone line, much like a 911 line or a distress-centre hotline for inmates-at-risk.
When native female prisoners at Kingston Penitentiary were asked about their attitudes towards female prisoner suicides in 1991, they responded that it was much the same as when a prisoner attempts to escape; there is an element of encouragement, and the majority of female prisoners actually respect a woman who chooses to die if she cannot deal with what the system is delivering her. (Kitchener-Waterloo Record, 9 February 1991)
Marlene Moore, made somewhat famous by her immortalized for a short period of time after the Kingston Whig-Standard ran a 48 page article on her 1989, was a chronic slasher and self-injurer from childhood. She traveled through several jails, detention centres, community centres, and mental heath facilities before she was finally returned to Kingston Penitentiary in the spring of 1988. She was designated as a Dangerous Offender (the only female Dangerous Offender in Canada in 1989), and was to serve an indeterminate sentence, likely for life. There she was put into solitary confinement and kept under constant watch with television surveillance. In the end, however, she still managed to kill herself, just that December (The Globe and Mail 13 Dec 1989).
Paul Bernardo, the notorious rapist, torturer and murderer, has been serving an indefinite life sentence at Kingston Penitentiary's maximum-security unit since 1995. As of June 2005, the "dangerous offender" is in solitary confinement, imprisoned in a cell three paces long and only an arms-length in width, confined for 23 hours a day. Bernardo is serving the longest sentence of any inmate on his range, but is receiving no programming. Instead he spends his time reading, writing letters, and working out in his cell. Bernardo's wing of the prison, which he shares with the other elite group of Kingston Penitentiary's "worst of the worst," is separated by both steel bars and Plexiglas so that other offenders walking past the bars to his unit don't throw objects at the inmates within.
He is also forbidden to speak with the media, including a recent CBC interview that was cancelled by the warden. Alth