Kingston, Ontario, is an historic city located at the meeting point of the St. Lawrence and Cataraqui rivers on the northern shore of Lake Ontario. Kingston is a vibrant cultural hub, known for its markets, festivals, restaurants, and its heritage buildings, many crafted from locally mined limestone.
There is something else that Kingston has long been known for: prisons. In its heyday, the Greater Kingston area was home to an astonishing ten minimum-, medium-, and maximum-security federal penitentiaries.
The principal reasons given for the concentration of correctional facilities in the area are that Ontario is the most densely populated region in Canada with a correspondingly higher crime rate. Kingston is roughly equidistant from the major centres of Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, making it a favourable central location for correctional institutions. Also, going way back to 1835, when the bleak limestone fortress now called the Kingston Penitentiary opened, the know-how required to run prisons of all types and the inmate labour often rounded up for new builds were already in place. All these factors made it more cost-efficient to build additional facilities in an area where older ones already existed.
Although I could conceivably have filled the pages of On the Lam with escape stories from Kingston-area penitentiaries alone, my aim was far more comprehensive: to describe breakouts from a broad spectrum of prisons both within Canada and abroad. My lens was wide enough to take in unlawful escapes from other spaces. To illustrate: the very first story in On the Lam highlights two getaways in the North-West Territories (now Alberta) at the turn of the twentieth century, one from a moving train and the other from the Calgary police barracks. Escapes from hospitals, courthouses, and vehicles are also included in the mix. Most of the stories, however, involve breakouts from brick-and-mortar institutions. Forbidding Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Penitentiary in Laval, Quebec, is featured in several chapters, as is supposedly super-secure La Santé Prison in Paris, France. And then there’s what can only be described as the epic fail: Oakalla Prison in Burnaby, British Columbia. During a fifty-year period, more than 890 men, women, and young offenders succeeded in breaking out.
However, given the prominence of Kingston in the Canadian correctional cosmos, three penitentiaries in the region get starring roles in the book: maximum-security Millhaven Institution, where the biggest ever jailbreak from a Canadian federal prison took place in 1972; medium-security Joyceville Institution, the launchpad for a couple of cheeky escapes in 1979; and the granddaddy of them all, maximum-security Kingston Penitentiary, the grim site of violence, riots, and several spectacular escapes during the 178 years it served as Canada’s most notorious prison.
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