This is the story of Canada’s attempt to build its own Alcatraz-like prison - why it was planned, and why it was never built. It is also a story of prison reform in Canada, and the authoritarianism often emergent in elite reform projects. Buckle in, it’s a long one. The Archambault Report of 1938, the published findings of the Royal Commission to Investigate the Penal System of Canada, is held by many criminologists, penologists and federal corrections as the foundation of Canada’s liberal, reformist, rehabilitation-focused, criminal justice system. Penal reformers in the 1940s and 50s treated it like a blueprint of sorts: its vision of liberalized parole, specialized training, a greater focus on education and psychiatric care, treatment for addictions, professional staff training, organized inmate recreation, a grievance process, and the erection of low security institutions was more or less followed until the 1960s.
Much less heralded by later day criminologists and penologists are the Report’s preoccupations with punishing homosexuals, correcting ‘the moral failings of the age’, contempt for, and a desire to discipline, the working class that supposedly birthed the criminal class, and hostility to the inmate activism – a wave of massive riots, strikes and protests from 1932 to 1937 - that had led to the calling of the Royal Commission in the first place. “Nothing could be more injurious” than to let inmates organize for penal reform, and so the good reformer must do everything to pre-empt complaint. Keep this in mind later when we move from recommendation to implementation. In this regard, the Royal Commission report is a document typical of the Mackenzie King-era civil service and of mid-twentieth century Canada (and operant still in many aspects of Canadian popular ideology): conflict should be resolved by a moderating technocratic elite who can manage competing factions through expert guidance and intervention.
The Report identified a number of serious issues afflicting the penal system, with one of the most serious the persistent, recidivist or habitual criminal. An entire chapter was dedicated to this ‘problem population’ whose existence demanded the most severe treatment by even the most progressive penal reformer. The Commissioners concluded that “there will always remain a residue of the criminal class which is of incurable criminal tendencies and which will be unaffected by reformative efforts.” Prison held “no terrors” for them and they were “the costly worthless dregs of society” that must be isolated “so that their contaminating influence will be reduced to a minimum both in prison and out.”
After discussing how preventive detention would work legally – any person convicted of a third indictable offense could (read: should) be given an indeterminate, or life, sentence ended only by parole or pardon – the Report moves on to envisaging what kind of facility should be used to house these prisoners. Its primary aim would be to “segregate the lawbreaker from society…[and] provide for safe custody by maximum security” and “should be erected remote from any other penal institution.” This was absolutely in keeping with modern penology, and the Commissioners praised British and French experiments to that end. Taking Alcatraz as the best example, the Commissioners suggested the use of Grosse Isle, an island in the St. Lawrence River near the city of Quebec, and formerly used as a quarantine station for immigrants – where thousands had died from cholera and other communicable diseases in the 19th century. The similarities between quarantine and penitentiary discipline were long ago pointed out by Foucault, but it’s rare to see the connection between containing disease and containing people made so obvious in actual practice.
When the Royal Commission said ‘habitual criminal,’ the officials of the Dominion Penitentiaries heard ‘agitators.’ They consistently considered the segregation and isolation of agitators to be their most urgent need. This was not a misunderstanding of the Royal Commission’s recommendation - they were really looking at the problem from both sides of the coin. A new Inspector of Penitentiaries, George Shortt, secretary to the Royal Commission, a Queen’s and McGill grad, and future urban planner, took up the task of creating this maximum security isolation prison. Shortt agreed with the conclusions of penitentiary officers that the convict revolts of the 1930s had been precipitated by a small number of agitators who exploited “legitimate grievances” to “incite others to create disturbances.” He wrote in an August 1939 memo that only segregation could “eliminate” the “disruption of ordinary penitentiary routine…and reformative influences.” Also planned by Shortt were a dedicated facility for treating prisoners with addiction problems and another for prisoners with psychiatric issues or ‘sub-normal mentality,’ also intended to relieve disciplinary issues.
In all this correspondence, the agitator remained undefined, a sort of prison bogeyman. Unlike recidivism, which could be measured, the agitator was always somewhat shadowy and amorphous as a ‘type.’ Agitators were often considered synonymous with incorrigible, recidivist, and habitual prisoners, but this was not a given. An agitator might be a ‘jailhouse lawyer’ who knew the laws of Canada and the prison regulations well, from long acquaintance, but this was not always so. The agitator could be a lifer or long termer, but not always – and young, first time penitentiary prisoners (but with previous reformatory terms) were often at the forefront of strikes and protests in the 1930s. Agitators were also not coterminous with types of crimes – though ‘holdup men’ and armed robbers were often listed as agitators. What was clear to penitentiary officers was that agitators were charismatic, intelligent, politically aware, and capable of influencing others to take action – that is, they were leaders within the fractious, always changing inmate community. Isolation would, essentially, decapitate prisoner unrest. Identifying and isolating “the agitator class” became a pressing issue as unrest grew in the penitentiaries in the late winter and spring of 1939. A new Penitentiary Act was set to be debated in Parliament in March, the implementation of (some) Royal Commission recommendations was eagerly awaited inside prisons, and some prisoners were prepared to use protest to remind the politicians of their demands for humane treatment. At the same time that mass hunger strikes and work stoppages broke out in July and August 1939 at Saskatchewan, Kingston and St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiaries - sparked by parsimonious royal clemency granted during the Royal Visit but really about recreation, radio, work conditions, food - Inspector Shortt was compiling lists of agitators, submitted by senior penitentiary officers across Canada.
A total of 341 prisoners were identified as being transferrable to this projected isolation prison on Grosse Isle, with the majority incarcerated at Kingston and St. Vincent de Paul in Laval. All federal institutions had nonexistent or inadequate facilities for segregation within their own walls – inadequate mostly because men in segregation cell blocks could still get messages to their supporters in what we would now call general population. And of course, there were no such thing as maximum or medium or minimum security in 1939 - all federal prisoners, no matter their crime or conduct, laboured and lived together in one big house. By this point, initial planning for the new prison at Grosse Isle was already underway, and Shortt envisioned, in a July 1939 memorandum to Minister of Justice Ernest Lapointe, equipping this new facility with “tear and nauseating gas and gas masks…search-lights…police dogs for each yard officer on night duty…to warn against ambush in the darkness…special enclosed cells.” A new disciplinary routine, far more severe than the one in place at existing penitentiaries, would be instituted “specially adapted to the agitator class…giving the convicts plain food and exercise, but no privileges.” The workshops, dedicated only to exhausting labour like canvas working and sand making, would be equipped with steel cages “to isolate ‘bad actors’ in the population” during potential unrest, and a machine gun was planned to be mounted at the entrance. A preliminary survey of Grosse Isle had been made in early 1939 by Earl O’Leary, another Inspector of Penitentiaries, and the buildings at the old quarantine station were found to be in good condition and suitable for upgrading to cell blocks “if [prison] labour can be secured.” The only problem: the Immigration Department had no interest in giving up its facilities on the island, even if they were no longer in use.
Stymied in this regard, Shortt turned to Stony Mountain Penitentiary in Manitoba, which was isolated enough from Winnipeg to serve well as a new maximum security prison. Shortt even drafted a tentative staff transfer list, full of officers who had been condemned as unsuitable by the Royal Commission but whose “severity” and “martial discipline” would suit them well for controlling a refractory population. However, resistance from existing penitentiary staff and surrounding villages to this plan stymied it in the planning phase.
In January 1940, Shortt, in desperation, suggested that the federal government buy the newly completed and very costly provincial jail in Gatineau-Hull to use as a “recidivist prison” but almost immediately after an approach was made, the jail was taken over to serve as an internment facility for political prisoners. After this, with the war on, and prison unrest subsiding, any further plans for a segregation prison were put on hold, and no serious efforts were made to build a prison in this style until the opening of Millbrook Reformatory in 1959 and the Special Correctional Unit in Laval in 1965-66. There is a question as to whether this plan would have worked as intended (or if any kind of control unit, special handling unit or super-maximum on these lines does). For one, it dramatically underestimated the scale of inmate resentment during the 1932-33 and 1939-40 waves of protest – they were definitely not the work of ‘an agitator class’ nor of ‘habitual criminals.’ (Indeed, the experiences of that first wave of riots probably formed the agitator class) Removing agitators from a prison is not necessarily a solution, as Stanley Cohen has pointed out – paradoxically, if you remove the worst behaved 5% from a population, replacements to fill that gap will soon arise. As Donald Clemmer identified in 1940, and well known by prisoners of this period, individuals with long experience inside can actually have a stabilizing or restraining influence on younger inmates. Undoubtedly, as David Ward’s work on Alcatraz shows, the vast majority of prisoners who ended up at this segregation prison would have been young men who were disciplinary problems being dumped by other prisons, and undoubtedly the agitators and habitual prisoners would have quickly been outnumbered.
As it was, the preventive detention outlined by the Royal Commission was never fully implemented on the vast scale they envisaged - only fifty-six men between 1950 and 1960 were given indeterminate sentences. Even this was considered too many by legal experts of the time - especially because many of the men thus convicted, while agitators and troublemakers in the 1930s and 40s, were non-violent drug dealers and break & enter men, and middle aged to boot by 1960. Image is Grosse Isle, Quarantine Station, c. 1905-1910. Library and Archives Canada.