“But the convicts were not the only ones to spend long years behind the walls. Like many a subsequent warden, Aeneas Macdonell often more to contend with at the hands of his lower-class and frequently hostile guards than he did from the convicts. Macdonell often felt that the government was forcing him to employ some of the worst dregs of Canadian society, and perhaps the worst of these was his long-time acting deputy warden, one Samuel G. Murray. The warden’s daily journal is littered with complaints about Murray who, it seems, was incredibly lazy and spent most of his time avoiding his responsibilities. ‘I am sincerely of opinion,’ Macdonell wrote on 10 August 1855, ‘that there is no greater humbug in the country than this man Murray. He has nothing to do but to go about the Institution and look to the Convicts and it is not done. He is the leader of a pack of wolves.’ Other officers were simply crooked. In November 1854 guard Morris, arrested for stealing penitentiary property and released on bail, absconded before his trial; in November 1855 guard Flanagan was charged by Murray with stealing from the shoe shops and the convicts also claimed he was stealing their food. Flanagan was dismissed. There were almost as many complaints from the contractors about guards as from prison officers about contractors. In April 1856 a guard was dismissed after a contractor complained he was using the convicts to do personal work; in 1857 there was an investigation into pilfering of firewood and also dismissal of the kitchen keeper for theft involving an elaborate kickback system.
There were occasional references to guards associating with ex-convicts and humiliating them outside the institution. Most serious were reports of brutality against the convicts. The hospital keeper, in particular, was a man of cruelty and the object of numerous convict complaints. Juveniles were afraid to report sick because of fear of him. The most notorious incident occurred in 1857, when the hospital keeper killed a patient. According to board minutes, ‘Convict Waterson recollects Convict Berube being brought to the hospital...the Keeper asked the patient where he felt the pain’ and when he pointed to his stomach ‘the Keeper then said I will damned soon take that pain out of you and gave him a pretty severe blow to the stomach.’ Berube groaned terribly and died a few hours later, with the doctor being called for only at the last moment. Guard Atkins, who evidently observed some of this, described the hospital keeper as a tyrant. The punishment? ‘Dr. Nelson reprimanded,’ the Hospital Keeper and told him ‘to be careful for the future as a similar circumstance would lead to his dismissal at once.’
With wages low and formal qualifications non-existent, little could be expected from the guards, and the warden understood as much. Nelson and Dickson worked to maintain discipline and numerous guards were dismissed for such offences as drinking and sleeping on the job, but Macdonell and the inspectors also worked hard to improve conditions for all officers of the prison. They were willing to listen to the guards collectively, and they did their best to make their case with the government. Thus on 27 June, 1854, the minutes note that the ‘warden has again laid before the board the case of the Keepers Salaries, likewise the Guards have waited upon the board as a body to represent the low state of their wages and the high state of all necessaries; the board therefore deem it their duty to again press upon the notice of the Government the necessity of having their salaries raised in a corresponding ratio to other men similarly engaged.’ Evidently this effort was unsuccessful and in August when two senior keepers threatened to leave, the warden was directed again to draw the attention of the government to ‘the earnest desire of the Inspectors’ that an increase be granted. In January 1856 the guards won a small increase, but salaries remained low and the penitentiary was expected to carry on with a calibre of employee in whom the warden could place little reliance.”
- Peter Oliver, ‘Terror to Evil-Doers’: Prisons and Punishments in Nineteenth-Century Ontario. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. pp. 279-280.
