My reading on the commute to prison My first summer job took me to prison. It was a fascinating inside view of the now defunct Oakalla Prison Farm in Burnaby, B.C. I took the bus from our Vancouver home to Kingsway and Royal Oak, reading Fyodor Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment. I’d hoped to learn more about my environs, but found the tome depressing. At Royal Oak, I walked down the hill to the prison buildings, nestled in 185 acres (75 ha) of gorgeous green space bordered by Deer Lake. After passing through several clanging gates, I met a senior warden in a large office. After assuring him that I was prepared for something different, I was transferred to the charge of the records staff. The records office was a small basement room where new prisoners were processed. They stood in barred cells at the front of the office, until they sat down with one of the guards. The guard took their information and noted the personal items that they couldn’t take inside. It was a men’s prison, but some arrived wearing flashy women’s clothing and heavy makeup. Even bras were somehow filled! The male guards snickered, hiding their faces from the inmates, striving for a detached air. It was my first introduction to the array of sexual expressions in humankind. One of these new inmates screamed and wailed until she was taken away by several guards. It wouldn’t have been easy for her to don men’s prison garb and deal with catcalls of other inmates. The guards recorded prisoners’ details on an index card when they arrived. Thousands of these cards were stored in metal cabinets lining one wall. It was my job to cull the old, inactive cards, cross-referencing for aliases. The work was tedious but there was steady progress. The first day, they took me to the upstairs canteen where prisoners cooked staff lunches for work experience. With my free meal ticket, I usually enjoyed fried eggs, French fries, and toast with jam. I gained about ten pounds in ten weeks, which was a good thing, as I’d struggled to gain weight. The prisoners treated us decently and worked diligently. All of the guards in the office but one were men. The woman paid me scant attention, but the men smiled and teased. I lapped up the attention. I had a little crush on a man with a certain swagger. He professed a terrible reputation for womanizing. The canteen was the setting for our heated conversations. He argued that prostitution should be legalized, as it was in the Netherlands. I believed that the practice abused women and wasn’t ideal even for straying men, but his arguments that it was safer for women made me wonder. He also insisted that sex outside of marriage was natural and right. Functional too: he found it a great way to relax at the end of the day. His approach seemed self-serving, but I wondered if there was some truth in it. I was taught that sex was reserved for marriage, but knew that in practice, the rule wasn’t always strictly followed by people of faith. Our provocative discussions dropped off after he began dating a woman who sounded nearly as conservative as I then was. I enjoyed chatting with a handsome young Mormon guard about our respective religions. Near the end of my work term, he offered to take me to a movie and asked for my number. I agreed, but he never called. I knew that Mormons couldn’t see non-Mormons, and wasn’t terribly disappointed. Sometimes I was stuck working in a small back room, where a Playboy calendar hung prominently. The woman of the month sported gargantuan bare breasts. Such images weren’t thought inappropriate in a rarely used workspace in 1977. It seemed that a woman’s most valuable assets were those that could attract men, who were valuable as of right. Some of the attention I had was unwelcome. One guard would sneak up behind me and poke a finger on either side of my waist. He laughed when I jumped. One day I left a pair of scissors on a desk. The guard pointed to the scissors, and hissed, “Do you want to see those in someone’s back one day?” Sometimes prisoners were free enough that they could grab an unattended sharp object to use as a weapon. That was my first and only safety training for prison life. I never feared for my safety, surrounded by steel bars and gates and an army of guards who confidently handled any difficult prisoners. The few prisoners I met at the canteen were always well-mannered. But the air was charged with tension when the prisoners revolted. Above the bank of filing cabinets was a narrow window looking out onto the paved courtyard where prisoners took air for a set time each day. The surface of the yard was higher than the floor of our basement office. Sometimes an inmate would hover near the window and peer down at us, but their peeping was quickly discouraged. One day, instead of returning to their cells, the prisoners in the yard shockingly stayed put. The next day, they were still circling around the yard, refusing to go inside. I don’t recall hearing their reasons. Overcrowding was often a problem and may have been a factor. The prisoners were angry enough to spend nights in the inhospitable paved yard, without shelter, food or other provisions that they hadn't brought with them. The tension mounted as the sit-in continued. I feared for the guards I knew, who rarely faced dangerous or violent situations, but were called in as reinforcements. From our basement window, I held my breath on the day that the grim-faced guards marched en masse down the steps into the yard. From a distance I saw the faces of those I knew, armed with billy clubs in their hands and maybe more. The prisoners followed directions as the yard emptied. Our guards were subdued when they returned and didn’t talk about what happened. I was relieved that the revolt ended peacefully. That wasn’t always the case before the prison closed fourteen years later in 1991. The buildings were demolished to make way for an attractive residential community, while much of the green space where prisoners learned to farm, became Deer Lake Park. - Irene Plett Topics: Oakalla Prison, Lower Mainland Regional Correctional Centre, prison guards, inmates, prison riots, Burnaby, B.C., history
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WriterIrene Plett is a writer, poet and animal lover living in South Surrey, British Columbia, Canada. Categories
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