Meanwhile Warden Gilmour had arrived with his detail of prisoners.
He has been in prison work for seventeen years; before that he was a
physician. He is regarded as one of the best prison administrators in
the country. He loves the land, not for what it produces alone, but in
humanity also. The frequency, moreover, with which bits of biblical
quotations drop from his lips leads one to believe that the injunctions
of Holy Writ form a considerable part of his sanction for life, and for
that of the men in his charge. There is nothing mawkish or apologetic
in his adherence to Holy Writ as a guide. There is a certain severity
of viewpoint in his daily work. Nothing is happy-go-lucky about the
Guelph Prison Farm; it has all been thought out, and the warden is the
dominant personality.
“Remember,” he said, “this is not run on honor, this prison. I don’t
believe in the so-called honor prison, as the word is generally
understood. This is a prison that is successful because the supervision
is successful. Supervision will do what formerly guns and wall
accomplished.
“We talk about the originality of a prison like this? Why, originality
consists in doing what other people are afraid to do. I have not been
afraid to build this prison without walls. But we are everlastingly
watchful. Thirty miles east of Toronto, at Whitby, I have a hundred
prisoners building an asylum for the insane on the cottage plan.
The plaster, the lime, the sashes and the window frames are shipped
from here. Here at Guelph we can perform with prison labor more than
seventy-five per cent. of the building operations.
“Punishments? We don’t have them here. That is, if a prisoner gets bad
here, disturbs the order of the place, and we cannot make him see that
he must conform to the rules, we send him back to the Central Prison at
Toronto. But most of the men prefer the life out here a thousand times.
We take men that generally have still some months to serve. We have
been taking men whose sentences run up to two years, but more recently
we have received men with longer sentences. Let me tell you about one
man who was here.
“I asked this boy, some time ago, who had been in the Toronto prison,
what he found the greatest difference between the prison in the city
and the farm out here. He said, ‘Warden, the getting away from that
cell! To sit there,’ the boy added, ‘on Sunday, every evening and on
holidays, and have that cell gate staring you in the face, is hell!’”
We walked toward the new building--all of them being built by the
prisoners. Under construction, in a kind of hollow square formation,
were kitchen and dining hall, several dormitories and cell buildings,
an administration building and officers quarters. One of the largest
and best dairy and hay barns that I have ever seen is already up; also
a little creamery building. Most of the work is of poured concrete.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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