Perhaps with a last, lingering look at the cozy $400-per-annum rent-free house he had enjoyed for the previous eight years as governor of Toronto’s third jail, George Littleton Allen moved across the Don River to become the first governor of Jail Number Four when it opened in 1864. At his new workplace, he took up residence in the administrative section of the jail itself.
Exposés of conditions within the Don Jail were fast becoming a semi-regular item in Toronto newspapers, with Governor Allen often at the centre of the criticism. In a long letter to the sheriff of the County of York, one complainant accused the governor of using the industrial farm as his own “manufactory,” and brazenly pocketing the proceeds. Allen had been accused in the past of supplying liquor to inmates; this practice seemed to be flourishing still. Eventually, in 1872, the Globe called for “a thorough investigation into the whole management of Castle Allen.”
A few days later, uninvited and unannounced, a grand jury showed up at the jail doors, and the truth tumbled out. Their visit brought to light a shocking mix of filth and sloppiness, and clear evidence of the governor’s dereliction of duty: “The governor of the gaol being frequently absent, the great responsibility rests on me, and there are not enough turnkeys or men under me to properly perform the duties required, and look after the safety of the prisoners,” complained one of the turnkeys bitterly.
Outrage swiftly turned to action: Allen was dismissed.
His replacement in the hot seat, John Green, was much more diligent, but he, too, often found himself facing harsh condemnation. Consider, for example, this passionate diatribe in 1887 after a reporter posing as a casual prisoner at the Don exposed the remissness and gross abuse that lurked behind its forbidding walls:
Let us see now what is established about the internal economy of Toronto gaol — Mr. Green himself being witness. There is no classification of the prisoners that amounts to anything. The accused, the remanded and the convicted, the sober and the inebriate, the lunatic and the sane, the comparative novice in the ways of sin and the double-distilled brute and ruffian, are all tumbled higgledy-piggledy together in different corridors.… It is also confessedly common enough for four prisoners, such as Governor Green describes, to be supposedly washed in the same water, while that sometimes six pass through this terrible ordeal is admitted.”
And, even more witheringly: “We are quite ready to admit that Mr. Green is a careful officer and that he tries to do the best he can with the means put at his disposal. But what a mortifying ‘best’ it is even on his own showing!”
John Green was an Englishman, born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1829. At the age of twenty-one he left his native land, heading for the United States. He lived and worked in Chicago for a few years before moving to Canada. Thenceforth, his entire professional life would be spent within the belly of the Canadian beast: first as head officer of the Chatham Jail in Kent County, Ontario, then, for almost thirty years, as governor of the Toronto Jail.
There is no denying that Green’s job was a difficult and sometimes highly dangerous one. In 1883, for example, he was the victim of a vicious assault — he would bear the scars for life. A female inmate, Louisa Barker, complained about another woman working alongside her in the jail. A matron escorted Barker to Green’s office; the governor ruled that she had no grounds for complaint. This drove the woman into a frenzy, and, according to a newspaper report, “she darted forward and struck the Governor a blow on the head with a piece of bath-brick she had been using scrubbing the floor.” She was restrained by the combined efforts of the matron and a turnkey who rushed in to investigate the source of the commotion. Green had been “felled … to the floor insensible,” and, on examination, was found to have a long gash at the back of his head. Fortunately, the doctor ascertained that there was no skull fracture. According to the authorities, Barker had lost her reason.
Green did try to do the best he could. In 1886, the markets and health committee of the Toronto city council toured the jail, and, other than remarking (as so many had done before) that the “lunatics and epileptics” they came across should be in an asylum rather than in a jail, they commended Green and his staff for keeping things in “first-class order.” And, as captured in the 1891 Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Prison and Reformatory System of Ontario, some of Green’s views on the Don Jail in particular and the prison system in general were quite thoughtful, even progressive.
For example, on the imprisonment of young boys in the Toronto Jail he said: “The chances are against him once he goes to gaol. I think he will learn so much in the gaol through the association with other prisoners that his experience will have an abiding effect upon him.” And if boys were “sent to gaol I think they ought to be sent for the shortest term the nature of the offence will admit of.” Would he recommend that children should be taken away from parents who utterly neglect them? “I would have no hesitation in doing so.”
And what of other classes of inmates, “lunatics,” for example? Eighty-seven of them, noted the commissioners, had been committed to the jail during the previous year. “I think it is a great mistake — a great injustice to send them to gaol” was Green’s firm conviction.
He simply hated seeing groups of inmates hanging about idly in the corridors. “Any classification where a number of prisoners are associated together in corridors must be defective and undoubtedly this is the cause of many reconvictions. This applies to all classes of a gaol population.” His remedy? Hard labour, and lots of it. In Green’s opinion, it was a very good thing that inmates at his jail could be forced to work. However, it emerged that much of this highly vaunted labour was of the “make-work” variety. A visiting Toronto markets and health committee in 1889 had observed prisoners walking round and round the jail yard carrying barrows filled with sand. Green shared his dilemma with the visitors: “What is to be done? It is impossible to allow these men to loaf and lounge about the corridors, for it is then they concoct plans of villainy to be carried out when they regain their liberty.” But, he added, “it was unsafe to send those men to work outside the prison walls, simply because I had not guards enough to watch them.”
Contamination of prisoners was a significant problem for the entire jail population, not just minors. A remedy, said Green, would be “cellular confinement — complete isolation, the separation of each prisoner from all others.” However, this system was not ideal for all types of offenders: “I have thought a great deal upon the subject. I do not think that those hardened persons [such as drunk and disorderly characters and vagrants], who are constantly sent to gaol, would be benefited…. With that great regiment of old offenders, contamination won’t amount to much, but I would earnestly recommend separate confinement for all first offenders, in order that they shall not be contaminated.”
But this was all just wishful thinking. Green summed it up bluntly: “This cannot be done in the Toronto gaol.”
Inmates in the Don had their own litany of complaints. Limited writing materials; vermin in the bedding; being forced to “double up” in single beds; being denied admittance to religious services on Sundays; gross overcrowding: just a sample of their bitter grievances.
However, as a reminder that relations between guards and guarded were not always manifestly hostile, Governor John Green and his staff at the Toronto Jail received a letter of praise in July 1880 from an unexpected source. The missive was penned by a man named George Dickson, better known as George Bennett.
On the afternoon of March 25, 1880, employees at the offices of the Globe newspaper in Toronto had been startled to hear a pistol shot ring out, followed by the voice of their employer, George Brown, crying “Help! Murder!” Rushing into Brown’s office, they found him confronting an attacker and nursing a bullet wound to the thigh. Brown’s assailant was George Bennett, who had recently been dismissed from Brown’s company for dereliction of duty. As the Globe explained, “his whole life lately [had] been evidently one in which the man had given way to every vicious passion, drunkenness and lust being his predominant vices.” For five years, Bennett had been night engineer in the Globe’s boiler room. After several reprimands from his superior, James Banks, he had again come in to work drunk and, unforgivably, he then left his post unattended. The day engineer was hauled out of bed in the middle of the night to deal with a looming disaster in the boiler room.
This was the final straw. Bennett was fired the following day.
Simmering with resentment, he returned to the newspaper’s offices, a loaded gun in his pocket, ostensibly to wrest a reference from his ex-employer. Brown, a Father of Confederation, owner of the Globe, and a powerful political figure in the Liberal Party, was having none of it. He told the man to run along and discuss the matter with his former supervisor. Bennett argued; he pulled out his revolver; and, after a brief tussle, the gun went off, injuring George Brown.
Bennett was known to police as a violent drunk and wife beater; so well known, in fact, that, as later reported in court, he had the following conversation with his arresting officer, Robert Gregory:
“Gregory, this is a big thing.”
“Yes, it appears rather serious,” replied the policeman.
“I won’t get out of this as easily as the last.”
Prophetic words. Over the next few weeks, Brown’s condition worsened, and what had started out as a flesh wound morphed into “blood poisoning” — life-threatening gangrene. He lapsed into a coma, and, on May 9, he died.
The nation was in shock; messages of grief and outrage poured in.
But could Bennett be regarded as guilty of murder? Was it his fault that a seemingly minor injury had developed into a fatal condition? His trial lasted one day. The judge and jury were clearly in no mood to give him the benefit of any doubt, and he was sentenced to hang.
On July 24, the Quebec Daily Telegraph published an article that was typical of newspaper reports of the day. The story, stretching over more than two-thirds of the page, described in meticulous detail the last few hours Bennett spent on earth before his hanging at approximately 8:00 a.m. This was followed by a letter from Bennett to Governor Green, which he styled as “a warning to young men” not to fall, as he had done, “an easy victim of evil associates.” The lengthy account ended with a second letter, with the heading “TORONTO GAOL, July 23rd, 1880.”
I here express my sincere thanks to the officials of Toronto Gaol. I have received from them the kindest attention and utmost civility in attending to my wants during my confinement here. It is remarkable the descipline [sic] that is exercised in the discharge of the various duties to be performed and the caution, promptitude and despatch [sic] which accompanies all the work done within the buildings. The persistent watchfulness with which innocent and guilty alike are regarded when once beneath the shadow of this roof makes Toronto gaol a credit to the city and the country at large. I have found Mr. Green a kind shrewd, observant man: nothing can escape his notice. The manner in which the business of the place is conducted is worthy of all praise. Farewell, Toronto jail.
(Signed,) GEORGE BENNETT.
Enraged at being dismissed from his job at the Globe newspaper, George Bennett confronted and shot his ex-employer, George Brown. After Brown died of complications from the wound, Bennett was convicted of murder and hanged at the Don Jail in July 1880.
According to the report, Bennett was quite composed on the morning of his hanging: “At five o’clock he arose and making a careful toilet, took up his testament and commenced to read his prayers in an earnest manner.… He was dressed in a suit of black broadcloth and blue silk necktie.… Bennett had in his right hand an ebony crucifix.” As unlikely as it seems, this was entirely in character: in a complete about-face, he had dedicated his last days to penitence and prayer. Just before eight, a procession set out from his room in the west wing of the jail across the main hall to the east wing, down a stairway to the basement and thence up a flight of stone steps to the northeast jail yard, where the scaffold was set up. The group included Bennett’s spiritual advisers, the sheriff, the hangman, the government inspector of prisons, the jail surgeon, a handful of newsmen, and the governor of the jail, John Green. About seventy spectators were permitted to witness the execution. Then Bennett’s lifeless body was lowered into a plain pine coffin, which, according to some reports, was adorned with silver ornaments. In accordance with a requirement in force at the time, executed individuals were to be buried where they had been hanged. Bennett was no exception: he was interred in the jail yard.
This was not the only time that Governor Green and his staff had been highly commended: back in November 1877, John Williams had been another doomed man who expressed gratitude just before he was hanged.
Williams, described as “a man of medium height, sparely but apparently strongly built, and about 49 years of age,” was employed as a brick maker just outside Weston, Ontario. He was belligerent and abusive when drunk, which Ann, his wife of twenty years, suffered “with exemplary patience and forbearance.” On the night of September 21, 1877, after consuming an inordinate amount of whisky, he battered Ann to death. At his trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, the judge commenting that “in the course of a long professional life I have only heard of one more awful spectacle than that of your wife, dragged along the floor, and left under the bed to die.” Like Bennett, Williams turned to religion during his final days in jail, studying the Bible and discussing his readings with his spiritual adviser.
Williams paused at the foot of the gallows, then pronounced the following words in a “loud, painfully firm tone”: “I wish to make several remarks. I wish to thank the Governor, the Deputy-Governor, and all the officers under them for the kind way in which they have used me. I wish to thank my counsel for the way in which they defended me. I am happy that I got a fair trial, and I thank the public at large for what they have done for me. Also my clergyman. That’s all.”
Governor Green, who had visited him in his cell on the morning of his hanging, courteously returned the compliment, telling reporters that Williams’s “deportment towards all the officials aroused in them a keen feeling of regret that the law was irrevocable, and that they had to assist on such a melancholy occasion.” These are bafflingly generous words, you might think, considering the dreadful crime Williams had committed just two months previously. However, given Green’s progressive opinions on the treatment of offenders, it may well be the execution of Williams that jail staff found so sad an event, even though the man did indeed deserve stern punishment for the murder of his wife.
Like Bennett three years later, Williams was buried in an unmarked grave in the jail yard.
Overcrowding at the jail was an ongoing problem.
One attempt to improve conditions and ease congestion had been the construction of the Toronto Central Prison, which opened just southwest of King Street and Strachan Avenue in 1873. Designed by Ontario’s official government architect, Kivas Tully, and built by relays of prison gangs, it housed 336 men, generally serving time for minor offences such as larceny, vagrancy, or drunkenness. Hard work (making wool, bricks, and furniture, and building equipment for the railways, among other jobs), hard discipline (administered by armed ex-policemen and ex-military men), and rigorously enforced silence at all times were the basic penological principles upon which this institution was founded.
However, the Don remained ominously overstretched. In 1885, there were 177 male inmates in the jail, most of them on convictions of drunkenness or vagrancy, with only 122 cells to accommodate them. To relieve pressure on the men’s side, many of the men were moved over to the women’s section. As the Globe noted in October 1887: “Governor Green telephoned to police headquarters yesterday that he had 40 prisoners at the gaol for whom there were no cells. They were compelled to sleep in the corridors. The collection of prisoners who went over the Don Sunday morning was 54, and this is not counting a number who were allowed out on bail. The van had to make three trips.”
There was more bad press in 1888. In February of that year, the city markets and health committee made a tour of inspection of the jail. Although the place earned full marks for “scrupulously clean floors and immaculate walls,” the visitors found 162 men of all ages “lounging about” in corridors, “some reading, some talking together and others standing apart and staring into vacancy, as though all mind and motion had deserted them.” Also of grave concern were two young girls “of chaste character and imprisoned for the first time … compelled to associate day and night with infamous women of the lowest and vilest description.”
But the same report revealed that the committee was considering changes to the Don that would directly affect the living arrangements of its governor.