 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. Although Bernardo has much he wants to say about his once fiancé sex-killer-puppet Karla Homolka, Correctional Service Canada is enforcing his silence.
Despite these restrictions, however, according to his lawyer Bernardo is exercising regularly and maintaining good health. According to the Toronto Star, Ontario Region communications officer Holly Knowles is stated as saying that allowing media access to Bernardo would "feed" his notoriety, increasing his "grandiose" and "narcissistic" desires. This decision to prohibit media involvement is directed by Bernardo's personal Offenders Correction Plan, a long-term treatment plan to which every inmate is assigned. In addition, increased media access may also encourage more animosity and instability within Kingston Penitentiary's walls among fellow Bernardo inmates, constituting a security-risk (The Toronto Star, 25 June 2005).
In February of 2006, Bernardo confessed, by correspondence through his lawyer Tony Bryant, for 10 more sexual assaults he had committed but that had been blamed on others. One of these had occurred in 1986 in Guildwood Village, where he had been living with his parents at the time, and another the same year on the University of Toronto campus at Scarbourough. In 1989 he sexually assaulted another woman outside a Kennedy Rd apartment complex near the 401. It is now also suspected that Bernardo was involved in the disappearance and death of U of T student Elizabeth Bain in 1990, a point argued by the defence of Robert Baltovich, who was convicted of the murder in 1992 (Toronto Star 21 February 2006).
A year before in June, however, a reporter from the Toronto Star, Nick Pron, had the privileged (if not illicit) opportunity to speak face-to-face with the killer in his cell. As described by Pron, Bernado's face was white, and his features "blowsy." He had gained weight, probably from working out. Their eyes at locked for a long moment, the reporter gazing up at Bernardo in his second-floor cell, before Bernardo disappeared back into the confines of his 