GENTLY GOES THE DON: SHAPING THE NEW (OLD) DON JAIL
Second in a series focusing on Toronto’s Old Don Jail
By Elizabeth Abbott
By the 1850s,
William Thomas (1799-1861)
was an English architect who emigrated to
A few of Thomas’ most
notable works: the much praised Niagara Courthouse; the magnificent Halifax
Courthouse that presages some of the detail of the Don Jail; the St. Lawrence
Market; the 185-foot monument to Sir Isaac Brock at
The Don Jail project came
in the last years of Thomas’ life. But instead of providing a magnificent
finale to a brilliant career, it sapped his strength and contributed to his
failing health. Right up until his death from diabetes four years later, Thomas
confronted a series of crucial setbacks on the project. The most dramatic was
the newly-created Board of Prison Inspectors’ fundamental change of ideological
direction.
Prisons incorporate
criminological beliefs into their physical structure, from the site chosen, the
exterior and the furnishings of each cell to the purpose of incarceration. By
the mid 19th century, the most advanced concept of surveillance was
the panopticon design in which spoke-like wings radiated from a central
observatory manned by prison guards. Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham had
published a panopticon prison plan in 1791, explaining: “The essence of it
consists, then, in the centrality of the inspector’s situation, combined with
the well-known and most effectual contrivances for seeing without being seen.” The
prisoner must always be visible but must not know whether or not he is being
observed.[2]
Between 1801 and 1831, the
By then, there was
general agreement that incarceration was punishment,
and that prisons were meant for long-term habitation rather than brief, brutish
confinment. But there were two clashing sets of penological beliefs about the
nature of the prison experience. Auburn Prison in
The thinking behind confinement
at Eastern was that prisoners should be kept isolated in individual cells where,
like monks sworn to contemplation and silence, they would endlessly reflect on and
repent their sins. They were forbidden to speak and even guards refrained from
speaking in their hearing. They exercised alone in narrow yards behind their
cells, ate food passed silently through a small grate, could see neither one
another nor the outside world, and had nothing to occupy their interminable
days but to search their souls and, if they could read, devour the Bible, their
only companion.
The 250 original cells at
Eastern measured eleven ¾ feet by seven ½ feet wide by sixteen feet high, lonely
vaults whose inhabitants often went mad or died. But because they were intended
to provoke spiritual reformation rather than corporal punishment, the cells
were equipped with amenities unusual in all but middle-class homes: hot-water
heating, a water tap and a latrine.
Charles Dickens and
others condemned the Eastern model. “The system here is rigid, strict, and
hopeless solitary confinement … cruel and wrong,” Dickens wrote.
Those who
devised this system of prison discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who
carry it into execution, do not know what it is they are doing. … very few men
are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this
dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers … there
is a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but the suffers themselves
can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature. I
hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be
immeasurably worse than any torture of the body….[3]
Pentonville, in
Pentonville had been designated as
William Thomas’ model for
Thomas’ plans were accepted and the
decision taken to begin by building the central block and two wings. The site
of the new Don Jail was also chosen, city land across the
Construction began and with it, one
crisis after another. The Police Board was demanding, meeting on the work site
and issuing unauthorized orders on the spot; unfortunately, Thomas obediently
followed them. In addition, the project was bogged down in delays caused by his
alcohol-clouded, incompetent project supervisor, Thomas Young, and by fraudulent
work. Costs skyrocketed and tempers flared. Thomas was reprimanded and Young
was fired; later, City Council appointed Thomas’ architect son, William Tutin
Thomas, to replace Young.
This new arrangement did not
immediately reinvigorate the project. Instead, the Provincial Prison Inspectors,
a newly appointed body, pored over Thomas’ plans and evaluated them according
to their agenda of cleansing the filth of Upper Canadian jails where, they
reported, “We do not punish, or we punish improperly. We do not deter from
crime, and we do not reform the criminal.”[5]
The Inspectors concluded that there were several ways to reform
Next issue: Father Time Watches Over the Physical Plant
Elizabeth Abbott is Vice-President of the
Riverdale Historical Society. The RHS usually meets monthly, on the last
Tuesday of the month, at