A glee club of federal convicts, in skirts

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How has Canada's federal penal system changed in the past few decades? The photo above, taken in 1955 inside the notorious federal Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario, speaks volumes about historic attitudes toward correctional reform. It's a photo of glee club comprised of prisoners, though it's difficult to tell which women are inmates and which might be matrons, forerunners of modern-day prison guards.

I stumbled across the striking photo while sorting some old files. It reflects an era when inmates were packed into tidy uniforms, urged to participate in socially rewarding activities and then paraded before cameras.

I was left wondering if any of these glee clubbers from half a century ago were notorious criminals. Perhaps one among them is the mysterious Evelyn Dick - the infamous Hamilton, Ontario, baby killer who was imprisoned at the Kingston Prison for Women until late 1958. Dick served more than 11 years in the stone fortress before she was released in secret, taking up a new, anonymous life (more about Dick's crimes after the jump).

If you think you recognize one of these convicts, be sure to let me know.

The Prison for Women, once dubbed unfit for bears, operated for 66 years, until the federal government closed it in 2000. During that period, it was the only federal prison for women in the country. Recently, the property was sold to Queen's University and the stone wall that encircled the compound was torn down. After the jump, my retrospective on the pending demolition of the prison walls, published in The Kingston Whig-Standard in 2006.

Saturday, October 7, 2006

Bandit rodents with masked faces and dextrous paws prowl the century-old, eight-acre compound that Errol Abrams guards alone.
"We've got a raccoon problem," says Abrams, dressed in a crisp blue commissionaire uniform and black boots, and standing in the steel-plated foyer of the penitentiary portal.
The mischievous creatures have been spotted late at night waddling through darkened corridors disused for half a decade.
"We're trapping them," Abrams says, leaning next to a steel and bulletproofglass bathroom-sized box where a sentry once controlled this entrance.
No sentinel is needed.
Abrams guards 160 empty cells.
Two floors of offices and alcoves above him are vacant.
The cavernous, high school-sized gymnasium is littered with debris.
A segregation unit that could hold 10 women is an empty bunker of disconnected wires and pipes.
The sprawling complex the size of 511/42 football fields, enclosed by an 18-foot-high concrete wall, is silent, save for the occasional clicking of clawed feet on tile.
It is a shell in penitentiary's clothing.
Soon, it will be disrobed.
Recent zoning changes mean the wall could be torn down when an anticipated deal closes with Queen's University, a grand reveal in a decades-long spectacle of crime and punishment and a remarkable moment in a society in which the appeal of incarceration rarely shutters prisons.
Three of the four spans of prison wall, those that border public streets, will be demolished.
The towering, three-storey limestone cellblock, stripped of its perimeter cloak, will be visible to a community that imagined evil isolated there.
Carved from Kingston's landscape by convict stonecutters eight decades ago, the building will be preserved, a reminder of the roll call of pathetic, frightening, frightened and troubled women who lived and died there.
Evelyn Dick, the murderous seductress first sentenced to hang, typed and filed for most of her 11 years in the prison.
Her husband's headless and limbless torso was found on Hamilton Mountain in 1946. Later, her infant son's body was found encased in cement in a suitcase.
Dick was paroled from Kingston's Prison for Women in 1958.
Marlene Moore, sent to the prison as a teenager, died there in 1988.
The first woman declared a dangerous offender, she had a lengthy record of convictions for armed robbery, arson, assault, abduction and other crimes.
Moore was a tortured soul who endured years of sexual abuse as a child. She was found dead, her head dangling from the end of a prison hospital bed in 1988. A crude noose of ripped bedsheet was knotted around her neck and fastened to the bedframe.
Maxine Hector lived in fear of fellow convicts at the Prison for Women.
Hector was despised for her crime. She beat her boyfriend's three-year-old son so severely that he was in the hospital for a month.
Karla Homolka studied university courses from her prison cell, earning a Queen's University degree.
The Scarborough woman helped her psychopathic husband abduct, rape and murder teenage girls.
Theresa Ann Glaremin tended lovingly to a pair of pet fish she kept in her cell at the Prison for Women.
She was serving a life sentence, convicted of murdering a female friend by stomping on her head with boots.
When her prison pets died, Glaremin placed a pencil in her clenched fist, then repeatedly punched a fellow inmate she believed had killed the fish.
History is unlikely to remember Glaremin for her notorious criminal exploits but for her prison exit.
On May 8, 2000, she was driven to a new women's prison in Kitchener, making her the last woman incarcerated at P4W.
The prison was mothballed.
Since then, a commissionaire on duty around the clock in a small office near the main entrance is the sole guardian of the compound.
Quiet seems incongruous in a stone and steel fortress accustomed to the clatter of tools, the clicking of boots on polished hallways, the thudding and clanging of barred doors and the chatter of prisoners and keepers.
In the absence of guards, cameras and convicts, it remains an imposing place.
Visitors must pass through Tuscan columns that carry a stone portico over the double doors of the main entrance.
A bulbous domed cupola rises from the hipped, copper-clad roof, greened by time.
Seven bays of arched windows, three storeys tall, loom over visitors who approach the main gate.
The architecture was designed to frighten.
Social philosophy of crime and punishment in late 19th-century Upper Canada was built on the notion that stark prisons would deter criminals.
The place was intended to inflict terror to evil-doers. Nothing was more terrifying than the wall, built to isolate, divide and protect.
"The walls protect the myth that everybody who gets locked up is in some way a danger to society," says Karlene Faith, a retired Simon Fraser University criminologist who studied the imprisonment of women for three decades and who visited the P4W many times.
The wall is a message, cast in stone.
"It communicates that message, that we need to fear these people," says Faith.
She is excited to hear that the concrete barrier will be demolished but she wonders about the ghosts that linger.
Terrible things happened behind the walls.
In the 1960s, women prisoners were fed LSD and shocked with electricity in psychiatric experiments.
In the 80s, as drug abuse flourished, female prisoners mutilated themselves and committed suicide.
In one four-year span, seven P4W inmates committed suicide.
More than a dozen official investigations and reports criticized the prison as unfit to house women.
The Archambault Report, issued in 1938, just four years after P4W opened, condemned its oppressive security and lack of programs.
The wall was singled out for criticism.
Sixteen feet of stacked stone, topped by 10 feet of woven wire and six lines of barbed wire, encircled the compound.
The wall alone cost nearly $85,000 to build.
Instead of closing the complex and dismantling the wall, prison authorities built new cells and expanded the facility.
In 1978, the limestone wall was replaced.
Sheets of concrete 18 feet tall by 10 feet wide and one foot thick at the base were brought to the site, says Wayne Buller, the bureaucrat responsible for the disused prison.
"They were dropped in and bolted together," says Buller, standing just metres from the intersection of two busy Kingston streets, tilting his head up as if to see a passing plane.
In the air there is only the rhythmic sound of dimpled rubber slapping hot asphalt.
Cars are heard, not seen, inside the vanilla-coloured barrier.
Buller marvels at the condition of the wall after nearly three decades.
"We considered whether we could reuse it," he says, as he walks along the inner edge of the north side, an unblemished concrete canvas.
There is no grafitti, no stains, no signs of repair.
The pebbled surface is unbroken by cracks or scars.
Video surveillance cameras once mounted atop the barrier are gone. Grey steel posts near the wall are remnants of fencing that divided the prison compound into secure areas.
Prison service records show that it cost $500,000 to erect the new concrete perimeter wall, in five phases between 1978 and 1981.
It was scheduled to be replaced in 2020.

A timeline

1833: Property that borders Hatter's Bay, and stretching north, is purchased from the heirs of Philip Pember for 1,000 pounds for the construction of a new provincial penitentiary.
1835: Kingston Penitentiary is opened while the clearing of the remainder of the land is underway.
1895: A limestone wall is completed (construction start is uncertain), using convict labour, encircling the 8.1-acre (3.3-hectare) tract that will later become the Prison for Women grounds. The wall is built in anticipation of the construction of a 'prison of isolation' for insane inmates although decades pass before any building is erected; in the interim, the wall surrounds property that is used by the KP warden, whose house abuts the wall, as a playground and garden plot.
1925: Construction begins on the Prison for Women building, using convict labour.
1930: The 'boundary wall' of the women's prison is partially complete, replacing the stone wall built in the previous century.
1932: After a riot at Kingston Penitentiary, roughly 150 men are moved to the new P4W building, which is still under construction. The men remained at the prison for roughly a year and a half before being moved back to KP.
Jan. 24, 1934: The first women prisoners arrive at P4W; that year, 40 women are incarcerated there.
April 1994: Inmate disturbances and attacks on staff lead to the use of a male riot squad and the strip searching of women prisoners.
1996: The report of a commission of inquiry into the 1994 events sharply criticizes the prison service for failing to follow its own rules, breaking the law, and violating the rights of prisoners ; P4W's closing, announced in 1994, is assured.
May 8, 2000: The last woman leaves P4W and it is mothballed, although some Corrections staff use office space in the complex for a time.
Aug. 22, 2006: Kingston city councillors endorse the designation of some parts of the prison as historic, citing architecture that features hand-worked limestone masonry and Edwardian elements.
2008: Queen's University buys the property and buildings for $2.88 million

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