Like the poisonous miasma once perceived to rise from the swamplands at the mouth of the Don River, spreading disease and death in its wake, the stigma associated with the Old Don Jail soon, and irreversibly, attached itself to its neighbour.
But it was not merely a question of perception.
The physical setup in the 1958 addition was certainly an improvement, with toilet facilities available in all the cells, for example. However, conditions became so deplorable that a public institutions inspection panel recommended in 1979, less than two years after the Old Don had been cleared of its inmates, that the whole shebang (old and new sides both) should be torn down and replaced with a modern building. The seven-person jury lambasted the disgusting kitchen storage room in the east wing and noted the pervasiveness of mice and fruit flies throughout the building. And those much-vaunted toilets? They should all be ripped out and replaced with stainless steel units.
In 1982, the Ontario Ministry of Correctional Services was “discussing” the chronic overcrowding at the jail and “vigorously pursuing” short-term solutions. The wing had originally accommodated some 300 inmates. Now, according to a ministry spokesperson, the number sometimes swelled to around 570.
In 1984, an inmate was rushed to hospital after being slashed in the throat in a vicious fight with another prisoner — the weapon was a metal file, smuggled in who knows how.
Jail staff came in for their share of criticism. In one case, a “young and impressionable” Crown witness was placed on several occasions in the same cell as the hardened drug dealer he was due to testify against. However, Frances Lankin, now a Canadian senator but at the time a correctional officer (CO) at the jail, pushed back in an indignant letter to the Toronto Star in 1979: “When will the media publish some of the news events supportive of correctional staff that occur?”
Because there were those who tried to make a difference.
Take Kari Niemi, a CO who retired in 2011, for example: “How do you behave against other human beings even if they’ve done things against the criminal code?” he asks. “Service them with the basics — send them to court for the rest. Don’t make life miserable because of what they’ve done.”
Niemi says that working as a guard was “not comfortable,” and you had to be “careful to do things in a safe way.” He certainly faced physical confrontations, typically when inmates started a fight and he had to step in to break it up, but he never felt at personal risk. Niemi is a big man with cool blue Nordic eyes — hard to imagine that anyone would want to tangle with him.
However, a long-time female CO who worked at the Toronto Jail — I’ll call her Ms. X, as she prefers to remain anonymous — says that she had no bad experiences during her time in service. On one occasion, inmates in the corridor or range where she was working learned that it was her birthday. “They sang me happy birthday,” she says. And once, when the lights went out, leaving her in the dark and without support among the inmates on the range, one of the “regulars” took her by the hand. “Don’t worry,” he assured her, “I’ll take you to the front.”
Ms. X complained about the unfairness of work assignments and the sometimes awful scheduling. “The best part was the inmates … their attitude. If you treat them well, they will treat you well.” That did not mean you became a “doormat.”
In 1987, Lee Steven Chapelle spent two weeks in the Don Jail. Just nineteen years old at the time, he had been released to a halfway house from Millhaven Penitentiary, but after a parole violation he was sent to the Don, the provincial centre nearest to where he was living at the time. More recently, Chapelle’s twenty-one years of extensive experience behind bars in Canadian provincial and federal correctional institutions have enabled him to carve out a career as prison consultant, lecturer, author, and motivational speaker. He describes his very brief stint in Toronto’s infamous jail as giving him a “tourist perspective” of conditions there. A sample of his memories: a “penitentiary- like” jail, tougher than most; lots of bars, as opposed to concrete walls; a punching bag right on the range to allow inmates to get rid of their frustrations; the population “a tight-knit group of city people”; the “familiarity” between inmates and correctional officers, who generally “left the inmate population to police itself.” As a young federal prisoner with “no history or bad beef with anyone,” his short stay, he says, was problem free.
In 1989, it became evident that the New Don was not exempt from another serious problem once encountered in its obsolete neighbour.
At its grand opening back in 1958, then-governor David Dougall conceded that there might be escapes from time to time (“You have to depend on your staff and if they let you down, someone might get away”), but no jailbreak, he said, would ever, ever, successfully be launched from the exercise areas perched five storeys high on the rooftops and enclosed by tall wire fences with barbed wire on top.
He was wrong.
“DANGEROUS SEX OFFENDER SCALES WALL OF DON JAIL” shrieked a headline on June 1, 1989. The previous day, according to several graphic reports, Frederick Rodney Merrill, a convicted lawbreaker “who had honed [the] art of escape,” clawed his way up and over the now razor-wire-topped fence, ran along air-conditioning ducts to the west edge of the roof — trailing blood as he went — dropped onto the roof of the old jail, crossed to the other side, and slid around sixty feet down a drainpipe to the ground. He was last seen hobbling over the Don River and Don Valley Parkway via the pedestrian bridge in Riverdale Park.
Merrill was a United States citizen awaiting sentence after pleading guilty to the sexual assault of a fifteen-year-old girl and the beating of a woman in separate attacks in Metro Toronto in March 1988. The forty- two-year-old Merrill, described as six-foot tall with greying brown hair, a thick moustache, and a heart-shaped tattoo inscribed with the word Mom on his upper right arm, was being supervised by a lone, unarmed, “elderly” guard when he made his escape. This was in spite of a requirement that two guards should be in the exercise area with inmates at all times, and it led to angry protests from the Ontario Public Service Employees Union about chronic understaffing at this “maximum security institution.” According to the union, there were now 111 correctional officers, down from 137 a few years prior, to service an average population of around 600.
Merrill had a history of jailbreaks and attempted jailbreaks in the States. He became known as the “Peanut Butter Bandit” after his escape from a maximum-security prison in Connecticut using a hand gun his mom had lovingly delivered to him, secreted in a jar of peanut butter.
“I guess he’s going to be known as Canada’s most wanted man,” said a spokesman for the Connecticut Department of Correction. They wanted him back to face sentence for rape, kidnapping, and robbery. “All I can say is good luck finding him,” added the spokesman, unhelpfully.
A Canada-wide alert was issued for Merrill, with the media reporting that eventually more than one hundred police officers joined the manhunt, backed up by divers, tracker dogs, and a helicopter. Merrill was on the lam for sixteen days before being nabbed by three young constables, who found him ransacking cupboards in a home in Brampton, Ontario, at 3:00 a.m. Embarrassingly for the Toronto Jail, authorities chose to send him on remand to the Toronto East Detention Centre, and not back to the jail. He served a twelve-year sentence in Canada before being returned to Connecticut to face charges there.
The rooftop exercise yard from which Merrill made his daredevil escape would fall into disuse, and the watchtower that overlooked it was turned into offices. Eventually, the only exercise area for inmates was the bleak ground-floor yard between the north and south arms of the jail. It was covered with netting to discourage reprehensible folk from standing outside the wall on Broadview Avenue and tossing objects like packages of drugs or weapons to family or friends within.
Not that those imprisoned in the Don seemed to experience much difficulty in obtaining illicit substances.
As former inmate Eddie Hertrich explains, the netting covering the exercise yard was not totally effective; for example, hash-filled sockets or long tubes tossed over the wall could still drop through the mesh to those waiting below. There were other drug-delivery channels as well: men would come in from court or from the streets with substances in vials or sheaths swallowed or hidden in their body cavities. And some of the guards and other staff were willing to bring in contraband for a price. They would sometimes “fight for the privilege,” says Hertrich dryly.
The jail continued on its downward spiral.
Hertrich, once considered a threat to public safety, retired in disgust from his life of crime in 2014 and subsequently published a book called Wasted Time about his experiences inside the Canadian correctional system. In all, he spent thirty-five years in various Canadian institutions. Around four of those years were in the Don Jail, where he was incarcerated on nine separate occasions between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. This puts him in a unique position to evaluate the deteriorating conditions over time.
Early on, each cell contained a single bunk, making a total of eighteen inmates on each range. Later, the cells were double bunked, which translated into thirty-six men on each range. This led to “more altercations, more problems.” Eventually, a third man was accommodated on a mattress on the cell floor, and that, says Hertrich, “got crazy.” Rival gangs or rival dealers, he adds, would end up on the same range, and their bad feelings would erupt. The situation wasn’t quite as serious on the streets, where they didn’t constantly see one another. But once arrested and placed in the same overcrowded space they would “have to address their rivalries.”
In 1990, a coroner’s jury delivered a strongly worded verdict recommending that the jail should undertake “a fundamental change in its attitude and approach” toward mentally ill prisoners. This followed the death from gangrene in November 1989 of Mark Buhagar, a Mississauga man with a history of mental illness who had been in jail for eight days pending trial for attempted car theft. Following a heated argument with correctional staff, he was placed in “lockup,” or confined to his cell. After causing a flood by plugging the sink and toilet, the troubled and troublesome man was moved to a segregation cell. A pathologist told the inquest that the cell was found to be teeming with the bacteria that had caused Buhagar’s gangrene.
In January 1994, an interim report sounded the alarm on yet another ugly manifestation within Ontario’s correctional facilities. The report, called Racism Behind Bars, was put together by the Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System. Its mandate was to investigate systemic racism, which was defined as “the values, practices, and procedures that result in black and other racial minority people receiving worse treatment than white people.” After extensive formal and informal interviews, observation, and analysis of documentation, the commission found both overt and systemic racism in the provincial system, as revealed by racial hostility and intolerance in jails and prisons, racial segregation of prisoners, and racial inequality in the delivery of prison services. The commissioners noted that racial segregation was particularly prevalent at the Toronto Jail. One of their conclusions was that “the culture of corrections … must change.”
Thanksgiving 1994 was a gloomy affair. No common celebratory dinner, or anything remotely like it. After an attempted jailbreak, the entire inmate population was confined to their cells. Visits and even phone calls were banned.
In 1998, the lawyer of John Paul Roby, accused of sexually abusing dozens of young boys over a period of more than twenty years, claimed that his client had been threatened by other inmates, verbally abused by jail staff, and refused breakfast and a shower before his court appearance. The trial judge called this alleged abuse possibly “criminal.”
That same year, forty-one-year-old Rodolfo Pacificador was granted bail after spending six-and-a-half years in pretrial custody in the Toronto Jail — believed to be an immoral and iniquitous record. He had been held pending extradition for allegedly assassinating a politician in his native Philippines before fleeing and claiming refugee status in Canada. Pacificador described his very first sleepless night as the third man in a two-person cell, which he spent on the floor with his head close to a reeky toilet, watching mice darting in and out of the cell.
What had long been smouldering just beneath the surface exploded into public consciousness in May 2003 with a news story that became a sensation, not just for what it contained but for how it had been obtained. After a judge had cut seven years off the fourteen-year sentence of a man convicted of attempted murder, robbery, and confinement because he had already served time in the “medieval, brutal” Don Jail, Liberal Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) Dave Levac of Brant, the opposition party’s public safety and security critic, obtained permission to tour the jail. In tow were two “assistants,” one of whom just happened to be (conveniently unidentified) Toronto Star reporter Linda Diebel. As the Star’s former Latin America correspondent, Diebel had visited her share of “Third World hellholes” in more southerly climes and was eminently qualified to comment on this one, handily located in her own backyard.
What she saw, heard, and smelled shocked her.
The jail, she wrote in a blistering exposé, “smells like vomit, urine and years of caked-in, grimy mould. Every prisoner in his bright orange jumpsuit, every overworked and harried guard, breathes this toxic stench in with every breath. And, then, there’s the din, the mind-numbing din of hundreds of prisoners — 647 yesterday in a facility with a capacity of 504 — yelling, banging and driving themselves crazy.”
A guard expressed his extreme concern about the safety of what he called “human pyramids,” who Diebel described as standing “on each other’s shoulders to hoist themselves up against the bars, just to get a glimpse of the sky in little windows across concrete corridors.”
“We’re packed in here three to a cell. There’s no room. Sometimes the toilets are overflowing. It’s really bad,” said an inmate who was in jail for cocaine possession.
Jail employees told Levac that morale was low among staff, especially following the Ontario Conservative government’s budget cuts in 1996. Understaffed and overstretched — “the strain is there, that’s for sure,” said one official.
The tour wound through the kitchen, where something that looked like pea soup was liberally splattered across large areas of the floor, prompting a staff member to warn the group to watch their step.
“Well, I won’t pull any punches,” was Levac’s parting shot to jail officials. “You’ve got a tough place here.”
Levac faced censure for smuggling in a reporter, and by so doing breaching the Members’ Integrity Act, 1994. The integrity commissioner’s report was published on July 23, 2003. What made the MPP’s offence more reprehensible was that the jail was in lockdown at the time with public visitation completely suspended (a situation bitterly resented by inmates) as part of efforts to contain the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in the Greater Toronto Area. Levac clearly knew, wrote the commissioner, that he was misleading correctional authorities by not identifying Diebel as a journalist, although he accepted the MPP’s claim that he had not been aware of any special measures regarding SARS. “Mr. Levac,” concluded the commissioner, “did not meet the standards imposed by parliamentary convention. The ends, — exposing the conditions at the Toronto Jail to the public through the media did not justify the means — participating in a plan designed to assist in providing a member of the media access to a correctional facility.” However, since he saw this as merely “an error in judgment,” he recommended “that no penalty be imposed.”
Levac, and Diebel, were off the hook.
In early 2008, the “festering problem” of racism was again in the news. Selwyn Pieters, a Black Toronto human-rights lawyer who had once worked as a guard at the Don Jail, noted that racism had existed among COs in the jail for at least twenty years, but provincial officials had done little to rectify the problem. Since 2005, around fifteen COs, most of them Black, had received hate mail, seemingly written by co-workers. A particularly disturbing case was that of Charlene Tardiel, who had just taken special leave after receiving death threats over the Christmas period. “We have to go in and be looking over our (shoulders), not knowing if one of our colleagues is actually doing these hate crimes,” she told the media. “It’s a matter of fear. Am I going home to see my family today [or] be the next black peace officer that’s dead on duty?”
Around thirty COs, both Black and white, walked off the job in protest.
Union steward Hayton Morrison said that the letters had been turned over to the police. “It’s the most vile, hateful, racist kind of thing you could ever imagine, riddled with profanity,” he fumed.
The status quo dragged on, seemingly interminably.
And a sad fact was that not only those behind bars but their families and friends were sucked willy-nilly into the machine. A typical visit to an inmate, seated at one of a bank of telephones in the visitation room and communicating across bulletproof glass, lasted just twenty minutes. Getting to that point would swallow up most of the day.
Richard Poplak, an author and journalist who interviewed Toronto’s notorious bicycle thief Igor Kenk on multiple occasions in the Don while doing research for a graphic novel in 2009, speaks of the visitor experience. After making an appointment, visitors would show up and stand in line outside in all weathers — no cellphones allowed. Most of them were women, “old hands” waiting to see their husbands, sons, or boyfriends. After going through security and signing in, they waited some more, this time on a wooden bench in a small room. Once a visitor’s name was called, they were buzzed into the visitation room for their twenty-minute session. These places are “time thieves,” says Poplak. “And there is no compensation for time stolen.”
By then, the writing was already on the wall for the nondescript Toronto Jail. Its looming demise wasn’t due only to dreadful conditions — extensive changes had swept over Toronto since the jail’s grand opening in the late 1950s. In 1998, the provincial Conservative government tossed out the city’s existing Metro structure, and the former municipalities of Toronto, York, East York, North York, Scarborough, and Etobicoke were fused into one enormous “megacity” under a single administration. As a city, it is now the largest in Canada and among the top ten in North America. How big is it? Back in 2009, when the jail started winding down, the population of Toronto stood at more than two-and-a-half million. Toronto Police Service statistics for that year gave the number of reported Criminal Code offences as 180,283. To give just a sample of crimes committed: 5,444 were robberies, 22,964 were non-sexual assaults, 2,667 were sexual assaults, and sixty-two were homicides.
Existing facilities were beyond overstretched, and, to rectify the situation, the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services announced in May 2008 that an institution capable of housing close to two thousand offenders would be built to replace the existing Mimico Correctional Centre, the Toronto Jail, and the Toronto West Detention Centre. It would take six years, however, for the Toronto South Detention Centre, the second-largest jail in Canada, to be officially opened.
Gail Desabrais, as deputy superintendent administration, was a senior member of the team tasked with closing down the Toronto Jail and diverting inmates to other facilities while simultaneously trying to maintain its smooth operation, a process she described as having “one foot on the gas and one on the brake.” She, too, complained of the state of affairs in the jail. Around 2012, she noted, there was a problem with black mould in one of the ranges, and it had to be shut down.
And what of the accusations of inmates being beaten up by staff? “You will always have the bad apples,” like the manager who provoked then assaulted an inmate, was taken to court, and got off on “a technicality.” “Too bad it overshadows the really good officers that are out there,” said Desabrais: those with “a sense of pride” in what they did. Screening, she said, needed to be improved to prevent the hiring of people with serious anger issues.
In a thoughtful article in Toronto Life in 2010, following the death in the Toronto Jail of Jeff Munro, a diagnosed schizophrenic, over a bag of chips, Nicholas Hune-Brown drilled down to the heart of the problem. What was actually being achieved with inmates at the Don? Rehabilitation? Reintegration into society? Punishment, even? The answer: none of the above. The jail was simply a warehouse, but one where prisoners were “treated worse than the most dangerous convicted criminals serving time in federal penitentiaries.”
Overcrowded, understaffed, sunless, stinking, simmering with violence that could explode over something as trivial as a bag of chips or someone spitting on the floor — many fervently wished that the Toronto Jail would simply vanish off the face of the earth.