Book Review

In his introduction author Peter Oliver refers to Winston Churchill's observation that one test of a society's character is how it treats its criminals. After reading this fascinating book one can only say of Ontario in the nineteenth century that, in its treatment of criminals, it was significantly deficient in character. The product of years of painstaking research, this study of prison and punishment is full of detailed insight into the purposes ascribed to and the actual operation of jails, prisons, and the first Canadian penitentiary, opened in Kingston in 1835. Oliver draws widely upon government and legislative records and reports, prison statistics, correspondence and statements of prison officials, prison chaplains, and politicians and the evidence of convicts and prison staff as his major sources for this study. With these strands of evidence he weaves together a complex but engaging story of the gap between the ideals and practice of incarceration in Ontario during this period. In the process he highlights the record of reformative zeal and bureaucratic inertia, false starts, inconsistencies in philosophy, policies, and practices across and within the penal system, and the resulting lack of movement beyond original purposes and assumptions, as well as the slim record of innovation. The system proved to be something of a cemetery for new ideas.	1
While recognizing the value of various theories of crime and punishment in interpreting the historical record, Oliver is inclined to let the record, which is extensive, speak for itself. He notes that penal experiments elsewhere were appealed to and sometimes adopted, the most significant being the Auburn Penitentiary in upstate New York, which provided the architectural inspiration for and penal regime model adopted at Kingston. However, notwithstanding some copying, the Ontario penal system had features that reflected the peculiar strains of political and social philosophy operating in the province as well as the mercurial material conditions obtaining there. Overall, both political and public attitudes toward criminals and their treatment were conservative and punitive. In the process the penal system proved to be impermeable to significant change and to progressive developments in penal practices occurring elsewhere in the western world.	2
In tune with other common law jurisdictions in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Upper Canada undertook changes in the system of criminal law and justice inherited from England. These steps reflected prescriptions for reform of the system and the philosophy of punishment underlying it. Through the actions of superior and local courts and, ultimately, of the legislature, reform involved a perceptible shift from the death penalty and harsh physical and shaming penalties to imprisonment and fines. Insofar as the new order called for incarceration as a means of reforming criminals by working on their mind and attitudes, it was ill served by a ramshackle system of local jails. These were typically badly constructed, unsanitary, indifferently administered and constituted a dumping ground for an undifferentiated mass of adult criminals, juvenile delinquents, vagrants, the poor more generally, the mentally ill, and, for much of the period, debtors. Gradually some of these groups were moved to other facilities or decreased in number (the debtors) and physical conditions improved. However, although reformers sought to change the regimes from their essentially punitive or warehousing functions, these institutions remained largely impervious to new ideas in penal policy, such as classification, prison labor, and incentives for reformation. This was also true of new edifices, such as the Ontario Central Prison, an intermediate facility for male offenders, in which a harsh, punitive regime was maintained. The new institution that could claim to have an administration that purported to be benign and driven by the reformative urge was the Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women located in Toronto. Oliver suggests that under the supervision of Mary Jane O'Reilly and reflecting maternal feminist values about inducing change in women's lives, discipline was tempered by attempts to understand the inmates and their problems, while seeking to reform.	3
The original focus for reform within the penal system was, of course, the Kingston Penitentiary, which opened with considerable fanfare in 1835. Unlike similar institutions in the United States, however, the establishment of this institution was not the brainchild of radical or moderate reformers. Moreover, its founding was not impelled by any great concern about rising crime rates that seem to have been a spur to penitentiary construction in Britain in the period after the Napoleonic Wars. The leading proponents were the conservative ideologues in the ranks of the judiciary, legal professions, and the colony's legislative bodies, including the colony's Chief Justice John Beverley Robinson. These were men ready to follow reformative programs in Britain from which most wisdom was assumed to flow and who also believed that the penitentiary was just the place where offenders could reflect upon their sins and shortcomings and have inculcated in them the principles of moral and social virtue. The model chosen was the silent system of both individual and congregate confinement practiced at Auburn with its Benthamite panopticon-style architecture. Oliver notes that, despite the high hopes of its original promoters and later reformers who tried to imprint the penitentiary with developing ideas on moral reformation through incentives, the nature of the building, the inflexibility of the silent regime, internal and external limitations on both educational and work programs, the fiscal parsimony of government, and political neglect combined to produce a condition of stasis.	4
The author is, however, quick to suggest that beneath the rather dismal history of political and bureaucratic inertia, the penitentiary was a site of debate and even conflict over the goals of incarceration. He partially resurrects the reputation of the first warden, Henry Smith, the choice of the Tory promoters of the experiment. Smith who was dismissed after a highly critical commission of inquiry led by George Brown, the Liberal politician and reformer, was, suggests Oliver, unfairly maligned, as he struggled to give meaning to his mandate of penance and reform, in almost impossible financial circumstances. Ironically, despite the sound and fury of Brown's report little was suggested by it in terms of basic reform of the institution and its penal regime. Nor did Smith's immediate successors show any great imagination in running the institution. Change meant reorientation in political and administrative structures, and little more. This was as true of the period after Confederation in 1867, when Kingston's administration shifted to federal jurisdiction, as it was before. We learn of the frustration of the penitentiary chaplains seeking support for programs of moral and secular education in the institution during the middle years of the century. Inventive bureaucrats, such as E. A. Meredith, who saw the need to move the institution and all prisons beyond their punitive and disciplinary functions, were to be disappointed in their attempts to bring even moderate reform to either the penitentiary or the provincial jails. Enthusiasm about the incentives system for prisoners developed by Sir Walter Crofton in Ireland dissipated as it ran into political opposition, and the introduction of both remission and parole was very slow to emerge. It should be no surprise that prisoner's aid initiatives by community groups met either political indifference or positive opposition.	5
It is difficult in this account of the Ontario penal system in the nineteenth century to find much cause for celebration. The most that can be said for it, as the author suggests, is that it did keep large numbers of offenders in a remarkably secure system of incarceration. It may be, too, that there is something to his claim that as long as control of local jails by municipal governments obtained, the system was sensitive to local needs and provided a haven for those who might otherwise be on the street. Whether any of that compensated for the lack of imagination in the functions and running these institutions is highly doubtful. On the issue of the impact of incarceration generally in inducing a majority of inmates to offend no more, we have to speculate along with Oliver that it had that effect. What we can say is that its deterrent effect is more likely to have been the result of thorough distaste for the experience, if not desperation at the thought of returning to it, than of any uplift or educational benefits and economic and social skills it might have provided. We can also agree with the author that, by and large, it is the way Ontario society wanted it. This book makes a significant contribution to the historiography of punishment in Canada and the common law world more generally. The system and its various parts are fully investigated and presented and the record allowed to speak for itself. The result is that, while the theories of regulation and governmentality on the one hand and social and class control on the other find resonances here, we can also see clearly how at the level of practice aspiration invariably outstripped the political, administrative, and operational realities by a considerable distance.	6
John McLaren University of Victoria

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