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.
As we went through one building, where some score of prisoners were silently working at plastering, painting, carpentering and stone cutting, Warden Gilmour said: “You see, I have my cells only on one side of the central corridor. I mean that all the cells shall have southern exposure. Each of the cells contains eight hundred cubic feet.”
I thought of the twelve hundred cells at Sing Sing, still used, which contain less than two hundred cubic feet of air space, and have no windows opening to the outer air as at Guelph.
“Then we have dormitories,” continued the warden, “not the big dormitories of olden times, but comfortably small rooms that will accommodate from twenty-five to thirty men. We are trying the experiment. I don’t know yet how it will work out. We are expecting to have here ultimately about seven hundred men.”
I asked him about the expense of all this. “Are you saving money or saving men?” was his sharp retort. “Nevertheless, we are demonstrating every day the economy of using prison labor, as well as the economy of giving these men reasonable accommodations. I can’t give you as yet the figures you want. We are teaching these men how to work, and the usefulness of work. The bulk of them, when they leave here, are not going upon farms, but back to the cities from which they came. So we are teaching some city trades, but without neglecting farm industries. We are raising about all we need to eat, as well as the stock we raise for food. But a prison farm without important and diversified industries is a mistake.”