The B.C. Penitentiary may be long gone in New Westminster, but it's not forgotten.
The British Columbia Penitentiary opened in New Westminster in 1878, on a site overlooking the Fraser River. It was the first federal penitentiary to open west of Manitoba and housed those serving sentences of two years or longer.
Jack David Scott wrote Four Walls in the West: The Story of the British Columbia Penitentiary, which tells the story of the penitentiary from its opening in 1878 to its closure 102 years later in 1980. The names of the chapters give readers an idea of the content inside: Bursting at the Seams - 1955 to 1964; Calm Before Conflict - 1964 to 1969; The Stormy 70s. Royal City resident Jim Johnston started working for the Penitentiary Service in 1949, retiring in 1977. During his 28-year career at the B.C. Pen, he held assorted jobs.
"I was on the guard staff for awhile. Then I became one of the farm bosses in charge of the livestock and poultry. I had that for a number of years," he said. "They looked after the animals, feeding them, cleaning the barns. I had a gang of nine to 10 people."
Although his work crew was armed with knives on Tuesdays - the day when seven pigs were butchered weekly - Johnston wasn't fearful for his safety.
"You get used to it," he said about prison work. "Like in the war, you get used to things happening. It was interesting work."
Johnston has several photo albums that are filled with images of the B.C. Penitentiary property. Some photographs show potato fields stretching up to the McBride Boulevard site that is now home of the Justice Institute of B.C.
The penitentiary's farm had a thousand or more chickens that provided eggs for the prison. In addition to growing food in its farms and orchards, pheasants were hunted on the property.
"They sold the farm and I went into the greenhouse," said Johnson, who was experienced in horticulture. "It was the greenhouse that supplied all the flowers for the lawns and inside gardens."
Johnston worked in the B.C. Pen's greenhouse for a number of years. Having passed his horticultural exams, he taught horticulture to the inmates.
"I took over outside the walls," he said about penitentiary property located outside the prison walls. "I was in charge outside the walls from the Fraser River to Eighth Avenue."
Located next to the Woodlands School site, the B.C. Pen property also stretched to the banks of the Fraser River.
"I built the first wharf they had there," Johnston recalled. "They
had a boat out in the river. They used to snag logs. They towed them in."
With the assistance of a donkey and machinery, the logs were taken to the prison.
"They'd haul them inside the walls," Johnston said. "The inmates would cut them. We'd use them for fire."
Once a year, the prisoners would go through the ravine, slashing back the foliage to prevent fires from starting in the overgrowth.
Inmates provided all of the labour for work done on the farm and in the greenhouse.
"We had to put in reports for the day on their labour," Johnston recalled. "If they didn't get enough points, they didn't get their tobacco at the end of the week."
The B.C. Penitentiary had various shops where inmates did work like painting, carpentry and metal or brick work.
"It was to educate the inmates so they could get a job when they were out," Johnston said. "It was an excellent opportunity to get experience that they never had."
Johnston said many of the inmates were drug addicts; heroin was a popular drug at that time.
"I found lots of plants at the farm. I found lots of drugs," he said. "We had control of them. If they didn't work, if they got into trouble - down the hole for seven days. It was just a bed and bread and water."
In addition to growing poppies for heroin, inmates were also growing another plant near the exercise yard, a plant that staff thought was a weed until a senior prison official came to visit and told staff otherwise.
"Nobody knew anything about marijuana," Johnston said. "A guy came to visit. He said, 'What have you got that growing there for?' We said, 'It is a weed.' He said, 'It is marijuana.'"
Johnston said the prison had very rigid rules.
"It was just the way it was. We had lots of discipline," he said. "I couldn't hack it today. It was an awfully different ballgame in my time. They couldn't talk from six o'clock at night until six o'clock the next morning."
Johnston said he had few problems with prisoners not doing the jobs they were assigned to at the prison.
"You had to be strict," he said. "They came to work. My thing was they came to work. They liked it."
In those days, Johnston said prisoners who broke the rules were subject to five lashes with the paddle - 10 if they repeated their offence.
"That was a problem solver for everybody," he said. "That was the times."
Four Walls in the West recounts some of the hard times at the B.C. Pen, but it also highlights some of the lighter moments. In the late 1940s, the Canadian Red Cross began holding clinics so inmates could donate blood; performers like Louis Armstrong, the Mills Brothers and Frankie Lane, in town to perform at the Cave in Vancouver, dropped by the prison to perform with local performers.
On a darker note, the prison's history also included hunger strikes, unexplained deaths of inmates, Doukhobour-set fires in the compound, and hostagetaking incidents, the most famous that resulted in the death of classification officer Mary Steinhauser in 1975.
Johnston said there were a few escapes and attempts during his years working at the B.C. Pen.
"You'll always get the odd one. It was a little hard. We had razor wire around the yard," he said about escapes. "There were towers and guards."
The final inmate was moved out of the B.C. Pen in February 1980, but a formal closing ceremony wasn't held until May of that year. Johnston had a role in the official closing ceremony.
"The platform guests had been piped to their seats by Jim Johnston, a retired officer, and now at the end of the ceremony he marched to the front gates where he played Amazing Grace, then on to number 1 tower where his lament echoed hauntingly back from those timeworn walls," Scott wrote in Four Walls in the West.
While the B.C. Pen has long since closed, some traces remain on its former site, including burial sites of some prisoners.
"I buried the first six people up there," Johnston said. "There are 50 up there right now. Three years ago there was a body taken out of there."
According to Johnston, a First Nations man's remains were removed from its burial site and sent up country.
"We had to move graves because they were sliding into the ravine," he said. "I think it (the cemetery) should be saved."
The New Westminster Heritage Preservation Society concurs, having named the B.C. Pen cemetery as one of its Top 10 most endangered heritage sites or buildings in New Westminster in 2007.
"The headstones contain no dedication, no memorial, no date, not even a name, simply poured concrete stamped with a prisoner number," said an article in the society's newsletter, The Preservationist. "It was a burial place of those who had no one who could or who would claim their bodies after death."
The article states that a person could stand in the cemetery and not even know they were in a burial place.
"Just as was done for those who were buried at Woodlands, those who are buried here deserve a cemetery and memorial which provides a proper remembrance," said the society article. "It is, after all, a large part of our city's history."
