"Whatever became of that new prison?" Vancouver Sun. October 8, 1970. Page 42. --- By SUSAN BECKER (Last of Two Articles) OTTAWA (CP) - In recent years the fate of the Kingston Prison for Wo-men, where most women with sentences of two years or more are sent, has become somewhat of a political football - and one major conflict between prison authorities has come to light.
In 1955, plans for a new women's prison at Colins Bay, west of Kingston, were announced. It was to accommodate a gradually increasing number of prisoners. Tenders were called and it was expected that construction would begin the next year.
But in May, 1965, it was re-ported that the government was delaying construction until it had received recommendations of a federal-provincial conference that was to study the April report by a committee on penal reform headed by Mr. Justice Gerald Fauteux of the Supreme Court of
Canada. Again, in 1964, then Liberal justice minister Lionel Chevrier, member of Parliament for Montreal Laurier, announced in his native Cornwall, Ont., that a new prison for women would be built there the next year. The minister had served the area as a member for Stormont from 1935 to 1954.
Although charges of political patronage were bandied about, government sources said the main reason for switching the penitentiary location was because it was to be a bilingual institution.
Nothing came of this decision, however, and in 1966 the then solicitor-general, Larry Pennell, under whose department the penitentiary then came, said a new cottage style women's penitentiary was on the drawing boards.
Two years later, Mr. Pennell, by then an Ontario Supreme Court justice. was quoted as saying he expected definite plans for a new women's prison to be disclosed soon. There was no doubt that a new prison was needed "and the sooner the better."
The cost and the dwindling, rather than the rising, number of women being imprisoned in the present penitentiary have probably provided some basis for the changes in ministerial tunes.
In the seven years that acting superintendent Ethel Boyce has been at the present women's prison, the peak number of prisoners was about 135, and this now has shrunk to a little more than half that number.
One informant said recently he thinks the idea of a new women's prison has been dropped as being too costly for the number of women it would serve. Another said a new women's prison is low in priority because of the more urgent need for men's prison facilities.
However in March Allen J. MacLeod, then commissioner of penitentiaries, told members of Parliament who had visited several correctional institutions including St. Vincent de Paul that "the "women's prison is the worst now."
During the 1960s, events at the prison itself caused political reverberations and a controversy affecting in varying degrees, prison staff, after-care workers and prisoners.
They came to a head with the resignation, in March, 1966, of Isabel Macneill.
