Kingston Penitentiary (Federal Correctional Institution)
|Famous Prisoners||Paul Bernardo, and Russell Williams|
First opened in 1835 Kingston Penitentiary was to be a "humane, effective, and cost-efficient" means serving criminal justice. Modeled on the Auburn system, advocating prison industrial work as a method of prison reform, the prison's policy enforced hard labour on its inmates for the purposes of punishment, reform, and profit. For the first 15 years these objectives did not materialize, and the penitentiary's inmate population continued to grow (Chunn 1981).
Kingston Penitentiary was the birthplace of the Canadian Penal Press, with the publication of the Penitentiary's "The Telescope" in September of 1950. Since this time, more than 100 publications have been produced by Canadian inmates (Gaucher 1989).
Kingston Penitentiary was also central in developing the first introduction of medical services into federal correctional facilities.
Author Stephen Reid penned his first novel in Kingston Penitentiary, in which he described the honest and brutal power of prisoner-literature. Reid, who lives in Sidney BC, is also married to writer Susan Musgrave.
May 6, 1999: Tyrone Conn, considered a modern-day prison "houdini" for escaping from some of Canada's most secure facilities, escaped from Kingston Penitentiary on May 6, 1999, shortly before dying from a gun-shot wound during a police-standoff. He had been negotiating over the phone in his girlfriend's basement, in a house on Alberta Ave, with CBC TV producer Theresa Burke and a defense lawyer.
Conn welded extensions to a hand-made ladder and used a grappling clamp, which he had constructed where he worked patching mailbags in the prison shop, to scale the 10 metre-tall perimeter fence. To disrupt the scent of the bloodhounds, he carried with him a manilla envelope filled with cayenne pepper, which he sprinkled behind him as he fled. He also made a fake dummy of paper-stuffed clothing so that the guards would be fooled during head counts. Conn hid in the shop to construct his ladder, after all the other inmates had filed out and returned to their cells. Conn waited until the southeast tower guard went off duty at 11 p.m., broke through a screen door in the loading bay and bolted across the yard to the fence. Because of his dummy ploy, his escape wasn't discovered until the next morning. (2 May 1999 The Toronto Star)
A week after his escape police believed he robbed $15,000 from a CIBC bank in Colborne, a town just east of Toronto, the same bank he had robbed following a similar escape from Collin's Bay Penitentiary in 1991. He stole a Buick, and robbed a Canadian Tire store of a shotgun and two boxes of shells. He then drove to Scarborough to get rid of the vehicle.
The Special Investigations Unit, a quasi-external review body that investigates police involvement in misconduct, injury, or death, began looking into the case, but any inquest was called off in 2001 by an Ontario coroner, who indeed confirmed that Conn had committed suicide.Following Conn's escape, Kingston Penitentiary instituted a number of improvements in security, including new, round-the-clock staffing of guards on watchtowers, and more thorough roll-call systems. (22 May 1999 Winnipeg Free Press)
Hostage-Taking Attempts and Riots
In April 1971 a riot broke out over the protest of inmate "undesirables," including sex offenders and informants. Inmates were dragged from their cells, tied up and tortured on the dome floor of the penitentiary, resulting in the deaths of two prisoners and a subsequent police investigation (Desroches 1974). However, scholars have speculated there were numerous factors underlying the eruption of the riot in 1971, not the least of which was stigma-targeted violence. Boredom was considered a major factor, fomenting a culture of agitation, restlessness, and pent-up rage common to many maximum-security penitentiaries, and what may be involved in the so-called "rage complex" endemic to the supermax facility.
Another major reason was the institution's inability to maintain a stro