072816 Kingston Penitentiary Tour, Kingston, ON

When I was a kid I was a big reader; my nose was forever buried in one book or another.  Somehow I got turned on to true prison stories early on.  I read things like Escape From Alcatraz, Papillon, and lots of books about WWII prison breaks.  

Though my literary tastes have changed somewhat I am still very interested in the whole incarceration experience – it’s just such a strange/frightening/fringe element of society – and in my travels I have taken every opportunity to visit prisons, dungeons and other castles of exclusion.

In Canada there is no prison more famous than Kingston Pen.  It opened in 1835 and over the next 178 years it housed Canada’s nastiest and most notorious criminals.  I had read a few books about it (Go Boy by Roger Caron comes to mind) and the place is rife with tales.

So when the city of Kingston decided to open the place for tours I jumped on it.  Good thing too; though they could tour about six hundred people through the place every day tickets for the whole summer run sold out in just a few hours.

Seems I’m not the only one with a penchant for the history of the macabre.

July 28th, 2016 was the day.  I drove down with my pal JP and met up with good old Jojo and the three of us went to prison together.

The tour started when our group of thirty or so was told that we would be handed off to several different guides – all of which were former employees of the prison – and we were instructed not to ask questions about specific inmates.

We started with a walk through the yard and were indeed given over to one former prison guard after another.  As we toured the cell blocks, the work rooms, and the hole we were met by men with a variety of different attitudes, some gruff, some friendly, some indifferent, and all wholly untrained in the art of tour guiding.  

And clearly these guys didn’t get the memo about not discussing particular inmates.  Let’s just say there was a fair amount of name-dropping.  

I asked the least-gruff guard of the day if he ever made friends with the inmates.  “Not friends per se,” he told me, “but you’d certainly be friendly with some of them.”  I asked if it mattered to him what they were in for; if an inmate’s particular crime would keep the guards from being friendly with someone.

“Oh, we never knew what anyone was in for, and none of the inmates ever discussed it among themselves either.”  I knew that last part from all my early reading.

“Plus, everyone in the place was innocent,” he said with a chuckle.  Another inmate attitude I had learned along the way.

Overall the place was downright creepy.  It was archaic, dominating and intimidating.  Was it worse than Alcatraz?  I don’t know but Kingston Pen sure seemed a lot larger, which I’m sure would only add to the woe.  The prison’s almost Medieval bleakness was certainly an enormous step backwards as compared to South Africa’s Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela’s spent the final years of his sentence.

Along the way I asked two questions that were laughed off and remained unanswered, which was a shame as I was truly curious.  As the tour went along I noticed exit signs all over the place.  I asked if those signs had been there when it was a working prison or if they had been added for the tours.  “Ha-ha-ha,” I was told, and so I’m left to wonder.

I also asked if the prison conducted fire drills for the inmates back in the day.  Yuk-yuk.

After ninety minutes or so the tour wrapped up.  I enjoyed it and was especially glad I went so early after it opened to the public; I’m sure it won’t be too long before the guards will be replaced by fresh-faced students earning minimum wage for the summer.  We finished our tour by visiting the Warden’s House across the street which was pretty lame.  It’s free and almost not worth the price.