CHAPTER 4

In with the New

Schools, churches, banks, stores, residences, town halls, court houses, jails — you name it, hotshot architect William Thomas had designed it; some eighty commissions in all since coming to Canada from his native Britain.

Toronto was booming when Thomas and his family arrived in 1843, two years after the merger of Upper and Lower Canada into the Province of Canada. With a population of more than fifteen thousand, Toronto had just three registered architects to cope with the exploding demand for new designs and buildings. For an ambitious professional forced from his native land by a brutal economic downturn, this was the equivalent of architectural heaven. Within a year of hanging out his shingle, Thomas was hard at work.

Energetic and focused, Thomas thrived as both an architect and a surveyor. Most of his work was in Toronto, with the St. Lawrence Hall topping the list of his most-admired public buildings, but a smorgasbord of Thomas-designed structures were erected throughout the Province of Canada and beyond. These included schools in London and Goderich; town halls in Peterborough and Guelph; churches in Etobicoke, London, and Niagara-on-the-Lake; residences, including his very own dwelling, Oakham House, in Toronto; and commercial and industrial buildings in Hamilton, Port Hope, and as far afield as Halifax, Nova Scotia. There were even a jail in Simcoe and a courthouse or two in the mix.

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St. Lawrence Hall, designed by William Thomas in 1845, built between 1849 and 1850, and magnificently restored in 1967. It is regarded as one of Thomas’s finest Canadian public buildings.

Then in 1857, as Thomas’s biographers Glenn McArthur and Annie Szamosi put it, “the bubble of optimism that was generated with the advent of the railroads and sustained by the Crimean War of 1853–56 suddenly burst. In the post-war reaction, the entire world was shaken by panic and depression.” Toronto was hardly immune from the economic fallout, with businesses failing and individuals plunged into ruin. Along with his architectural practice, Thomas had been speculating in real estate, and the slump hit hard. In at least one case, he threatened legal action to collect payment, and in December 1858 he noted in a letter to the treasurer of the Brock’s Monument project (the towering column he had designed on Queenston Heights had been completed in 1856), that the cash still owed to him for his services would be most useful in his current dire financial situation.

With all of these challenges roiling in the background, Thomas must have been very relieved to be awarded the prestigious commission of architect for Toronto’s new jail. In March 1857 he received his brief from the city council: “to prepare a plan for a jail for this city after the model of Pentonville England Reformatory Prison.” With modest fanfare, the Globe revealed the full extent of the project: “Two wings of this gaol will only be erected at present, the estimated cost of which is about £10,000 [$40,000]. The separate system, now so much in vogue in England, has been adopted, and all the latest improved methods will be introduced, every attention being paid to the physical and moral health of the prisoners, as well as their security.”

Given the primitive and hellish predecessors of the proposed institution, these orders seemed remarkably progressive. However, the winds of change had already been blowing through the correctional cosmos for around eighty years. Now, a new and immensely improved penal philosophy was set to breeze into Toronto.

The transformation had been spearheaded by British philanthropist and prison reformer John Howard, who was born in North London in 1726. Described in his bio on the John Howard Society of Canada website as an unloving father and “a strange and complex individual who could not have been everyone’s ‘cup of tea,’” Howard found his calling after being appointed high sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1773. The sheriff served as the sovereign’s personal and military representative in the county, and Howard took his responsibilities very seriously. One of his duties was to inspect the county jail, which typically housed awaiting- trial or short-term prisoners.

What he saw revolted him; so much so that he spent the next seventeen years visiting both jails and prisons designed for long-term incarceration across the length and breadth of the United Kingdom and Europe, dying on the job in the Crimea in 1790.

“I could not enjoy my ease and leisure in the neglect of an opportunity offered me by Providence of attempting the relief of the miserable,” he explained in his magnum opus, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, first published in 1777.

Some of the horrors he encountered included inadequate food and water; overcrowding in “close rooms, cells, and subterraneous dungeons,” with wet floors and bedding; and poisonous air. “My reader will judge of its malignity, when I assure him, that my clothes were in my first journies [sic] so offensive, that in a post-chaise I could not bear the windows drawn up; and was therefore obliged to travel commonly on horseback.” He also complained bitterly of what he saw as morally pernicious: the mass incarceration of “all sorts of prisoners together: debtors and felons, men and women, the young beginner and the old offender,” generally in one large, wretched open space.

Not content to simply document the inequities he found in the course of his travels, Howard took it one giant step further: he weighed in on the architecture of jails and prisons with a focus on security, health, and order, which he considered crucial to their effectiveness.

In addition to giving advice about the site (an airy spot outside a town or city, and if possible near a river or brook), he strongly supported the idea of separate cells for inmates: “I wish to have so many small rooms or cabins that each criminal may sleep alone…. If it be difficult to prevent their being together in the day-time: they should by all means be separated at night.” Besides keeping inmates safe and preventing escapes, he believed that “solitude and silence are favourable to reflection; and may possibly lead them to repentance.”

Another key point: “the women-felons [sic] ward should be quite distinct from that of the men; and the young criminals from old and hardened offenders.” A great concern was the intermingling of debtors and felons, who, he believed, should be separated from one another. Novel recommendations were an adequate supply of fresh water, a “commodious bath with steps … to wash prisoners that come in dirty,” an oven (“nothing so effectually destroys vermin in clothes and bedding”), and an airy infirmary or sick wards. There should be a large workshop for those debtors and felons who wished to work. And, of course, a chapel was an absolute necessity. A stern warning here: those who would tear or otherwise damage Bibles and prayer-books should be punished.

Howard’s revelations led to an explosion of new interest in prison construction, especially in Britain. The health of inmates became a major focus, so amenities such as clean water, toilets, baths, and ventilation started popping up in new prisons. The issue of security also received attention. Underpinning the latest designs was a pressing requirement for the surveillance of prisoners at all times and in all places. As Professor Norman Johnston puts it in The Human Cage: A Brief History of Prison Architecture, “constant, unseen inspection became the sine qua non of good jail design and administration, the mechanism whereby the prison setting could be freed of its old abuses and the prisoners protected from corruption and disruptive behavior.”

Johnston adds that architects, court officials, prison directors, master builders, and stonemasons all scrambled to design structures based on three main layouts: the first, rectangular, generally modelled on existing eighteenth-century jails and older ecclesiastical buildings; the second, circular, which included polygonal, or multisided, arrays; and the third, radial, with wings fanning out from a central core. This last style became the rage, so much so that an 1826 British government publication quoted by Johnston announced that “we consider the advantages of the radiating plan to be now so completely established in preference to those of any other, that we should not feel ourselves justified in reporting favorably on a proposed plan of a new county gaol founded on any other principle.”

Reformist notions spread like wildfire to other countries, finding their perfect expression across the Atlantic in the separate system developed by the powerful religious and political Quaker community in Pennsylvania. Johnston explains this system:

The Pennsylvania Quakers gradually forged their philosophy of total isolation of each prisoner night and day. Solitude would serve several purposes: it would be punishment par excellence, but more importantly, it would give a man time for reflection and contrition and protect the naive from contamination by the more sophisticated, preventing also plots, escapes and attacks on keepers, which were at the time most prevalent. Religious instruction, work in the cell and visits by philanthropically inclined individuals would complete the job.

In short, the “separate” system meant absolute solitary confinement.

When it came to choosing a layout in the 1820s for the new Cherry Hill penitentiary near Philadelphia in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (later known as the Eastern State Penitentiary or ESP), it was decided that no better model could be found than the new radial formation adopted so enthusiastically in Britain and beyond. The architect, a young Englishman named John Haviland, accordingly designed a grim and hulking Gothic “hub-and-spoke” structure with seven cell wings spreading out from an inner core. The cells measured eight feet by twelve feet with a height of ten feet, and each one was provided with heating, a tap for fresh water, and a flush toilet. But the unnerved prisoners would know that they were under constant surveillance, not only by guards posted in the central watch tower or peering through peepholes in the cell doors but by a higher presence — the sole light source for each cell was a small window or skylight, ominously called the Eye of God.

Eastern — a true penitentiary with its focus on rehabilitation through penitence and reflection — “welcomed” its first occupants in 1829. With its newfangled radial design, its massive structure, its technical innovations, including heat, running water, and ventilation, its focus on surveillance, and its hugely controversial underlying philosophy, the prison became an instant sensation. Investigators from near and far, including government representatives from Britain, France, Prussia, and other countries, streamed into Philadelphia to evaluate this trendsetter.

Strangely, this system did not gain much traction in the United States, due to a competing reform ideology and architectural design introduced at more or less the same time in Auburn, New York. The notorious and storied Sing Sing Correctional Facility on the Hudson River in New York was modelled on the Auburn system, as was Canada’s own infamous Kingston Penitentiary on Lake Ontario.

Among the interested visitors to Pennsylvania was the great nineteenth- century British writer and social commentator Charles Dickens. In his American Notes for General Circulation of 1842, Dickens described a day trip to the ESP. Two polite and helpful officials took him round: “Every facility was afforded me, that the utmost courtesy could suggest.… The perfect order of the building cannot be praised too highly, and of the excellent motives of all who are immediately concerned in the administration of the system, there can be no kind of question.”

And yet he found the whole setup totally repulsive. Why?

The system here, is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong.… Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth, until his whole term of imprisonment has expired. He never hears of wife and children; home or friends; the life or death of any single creature. He sees the prison-officers, but with that exception he never looks upon a human countenance, or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.

Dickens described in dreadful detail a few of the inmates he came across. A German, incarcerated for two years, who had painted his cell beautifully: “the taste and ingenuity he had displayed in everything were most extraordinary; and yet a more dejected, heart-broken, wretched creature it would be difficult to imagine.” A man who kept rabbits was called out of his foul-smelling cell to talk to the writer and “stood shading his haggard face in the unwonted sunlight … looking as wan and unearthly as if he had been summoned from the grave.” And a sailor who, after eleven years inside, did not, or could not, speak: “Why does he stare at his hands, and pick the flesh upon his fingers?”

In December of 1842, the same year that Dickens delivered his scathing report on Eastern State, a new prison opened its doors in his own neck of the woods, North London. Cue in the “Pentonville England Reformatory Prison,” based on the “separate system, now so much in vogue in England,” which, as interested citizens of Toronto would learn fifteen years later, was to serve as the model for the new Toronto jail.

Pentonville had been established by Act of Parliament in 1840 for the reform and rehabilitation of men sentenced to imprisonment or awaiting transportation to penal colonies in Australia. Consisting of a central hub with five radiating wings, it was designed by Captain Joshua Jebb of the Royal Engineers, with the assistance of architect Charles Barry, and built at a cost of £84,186 12s. 2d. (It will be interesting to compare this cost to the eventual price tag attached to the Don Jail, which ended up being somewhat pricier than the initial estimate of about £10,000 [$40,000] as reported by the Globe.)

In The English: A Social History, British author and historian Christopher Hibbert writes that each of the 520 prisoners incarcerated in Pentonville had his own tiny cell, measuring just thirteen feet by seven feet. The cells were nine feet high, with a small window on the outside wall. They were admittedly well ventilated, but the in-cell toilets soon became blocked up and were replaced by foul communal “recesses.” Prisoners were not allowed to communicate with one another — they “tramped along in silent rows” and wore brown cloth masks over their heads when they left their cells for exercise. At the compulsory daily chapel services, they sat in separate cubicles with their heads visible to the warder on duty but not to one another.

Although inmates were permitted to work and were fed a reasonable diet, the system had a disastrous effect on their mental health. Hibbert quotes an official report stating that “for every sixty thousand persons confined in Pentonville there were 220 cases of insanity, 210 cases of delusions, and forty suicides.”

Isolation, penance, complete silence, constant surveillance: it seemed as if the future inmates of the Toronto jail were in for a very bleak time indeed.