In the News
October 3, 2013
Inside the walls of Kingston Penitentiary
KINGSTON – Monty Bourke pointed to the second-floor window overlooking the recreation yard at Kingston Penitentiary.
“That’s where I read the Riot Act,” he said, matter-of-factly describing how an inmate revolt in the late 1990s was ended.
With inmates refusing to return to their cells and prison guards exhausting the supply of tear gas in the prison trying to convince them to do so, the situation ended after Bourke read aloud a few lines from the Criminal Code.
Bourke, who was warden of the Pen for five years and is now president of the Friends of the Penitentiary Museum, was among the former prison staff who on Wednesday led about 600 people through the what until Monday was the oldest prison in Canada and home to some of the most infamous criminals in the country.
“I think a lot of them are overwhelmed by it,” Bourke said, noting that most of the questions he fielded from the visitors were about basic day-to-day activities.
For Bourke, who retired four years ago, the tours were a chance to go into what is now a very different Kingston Penitentiary.
“What’s missing is the heartbeat, the heartbeat of the prison,” he said.
“The mechanics are still there, the bricks and mortar are still there, the posts are still there. What’s missing is the pace, the heartbeat, the breathe of the prison inside.”
The tours are the first chance to visit what for many people in Kingston has been only a landmark on their daily commute to work.
More than 9,000 people have signed up for the sold out tours.
“They are loving it, right from the first tour,” United Way Kingston, Frontenac Lennox Addington president and CEO Bhavana Varma.
“They said it was fascinating, they had a great time.
“As soon as you walk in, that courtyard is deceptive because it looks like such a beautiful spot until you start to look around and you see the bars on the windows.”
The tours are expected to be great too for the United Way’s fundraising campaign this year.
In the next three weeks, 9,400 people who paid $20 each to tour the facility will add about $188,000 to the United Way’s annual campaign.
For some, the 90-minute tour was not long enough.
“I though seeing the cells was really interesting but I felt we were really limited,” said Kayla Cheetham, 19, who went on the tour with her mother Michelle and sister Sierra, 8.
Kayla Cheetham, a student in the legal and medical office administration program at St. Lawrence College and is considering a career in corrections.
She had done a placement at Millhaven Institute but it didn’t include a tour of that prison.
The tour didn’t answer one question Michelle Cheetham had: she didn’t get to see Paul Bernardo’s cell.
A morbid curiosity with the prison’s inmates, 95% of whom were imprisoned for serious crimes against other people, was likely behind much of the interest in the tours.
“My expectation was just to see the architecture more than anything else in here,” said Jim Boyce, who toured the prison Wednesday. “But of course, as everyone, there is probably a shameful interest in some of the more high-profile convicts in there.”
Boyce said the tours are an excellent way to both feed the public’s curiosity about what is behind the prison’s walls while at the same time raise money for the United Way.
“Hopefully, some of the funds they raise can go to programming that prevents people from ending up in places like this,” he said.
Source: Elliot Ferguson, Kingston Whig-Standard
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