IF THE WALL S COULD TALK
After 33 years of noise from the challenging business of housing prisoners, the old Edmonton Remand Centre falls silent
For a rare glimpse inside the old remand centre,
For more than 33 years, the Edmonton Remand Centre never stopped.
Inside the fortress of oatmealcoloured concrete, through windows shaped like antique keys, the building at 104th Avenue and 97th Street hummed with activity, day and night.
There were inmates and shifts of correctional officers, nurses, doctors and dentists, psychiatrists, kitchen staff, maintenance workers, chaplains.
There were police officers bringing in new arrests, lawyers meeting with clients, family and friends visiting through thick panes of glass. The building was alive with voices and yelling, with the clang of heavy doors, with toilets flushing, and the other sounds of hundreds of people living together in close quarters, an entire community behind lock and key, nestled right in the heart of Edmonton.
Today the building is eerily still, empty and quiet for the first time in three decades.
“I almost feel like I should buy an acreage to move it to,” says Doug Campbell, who worked at the building from before it opened until inmates were moved out to the new North Edmonton Remand Centre in April. “I have an attachment to it. I do, I really do. It’s been home for a long time.”
New arrests came to the Edmonton Remand Centre through the basement, waiting to be processed in blue and white cinder block holding cells that were most often packed shoulder-to-shoulder with people.
Some of Alberta’s most notorious inmates waited in those rooms. There were people who would be convicted of serious crimes and spend the rest of their lives behind bars, and those that would be found not guilty of any crime. There were accused serial killers, terrorists, murderers, fraudsters, sex offenders, petty offenders, drunks, drug addicts and the mentally ill, all waiting to check in to their shared residence in the centre of the city.
Today, one of the holding cells is still splattered with blood, a crimson spray dried across the bench and wall.
“That must have been from the last day,” muses Jim Tessier, facilities manager for Alberta Infrastructure, on a tour of the empty building. “Usually we would have gotten the Hazmat team in here right away to clean that up.”
Construction on the Edmonton Remand Centre began with a ceremonial groundbreaking on Dec. 1, 1976, on a plot of land at 96th Street and 104th Avenue that had been bought from the city for just under $4 million. There were great expectations about the new $18-million centre, which was to be a much-needed release valve for the old, overcrowded Fort Saskatchewan jail.
Built in 1915 and expanded throughout the decades, the old Fort Saskatchewan facility was a remand centre and jail, holding both those that were serving sentences and those still awaiting trial. By the 1970s, the facility was packed and dangerous, with 600-700 inmates squeezed into an aging facility designed to hold half that many.
“I have used up all my options,” former solicitor general Roy Farran told the media in 1976, when he warned that some inmates would have to start triple bunking. “There will be a lot of relief when the new remand centre opens.”
In the meantime, there were riots, assaults, and sit-ins by inmates protesting their conditions, and the situation was worsening by the day. By 1978, defence lawyer Bruce Gunn described the jail as “a pressure cooker that could explode at any time.”
With more than 90 escapes in a five-year period — including the escape of 13 inmates in a three-week period in 1979 — the Fort Saskatchewan facility had also earned the nickname “the sieve,” and authorities and the public were increasingly anxious to stem the flow of escaped inmates onto the streets.
In that environment, the new remand centre was a beacon of hope, promising modern, humane facilities for inmates, and increased safety and security for the community overall.
At first, it appeared to deliver.
The building’s style was modern and clean, with fixtures in trendy orange, and new security features far beyond the Fort Saskatchewan facility.
“It was way ahead of its time,” as Campbell recalls.
An Edmonton Journal story on Sept. 18, 1979, described “comfortable areas set aside for educational material,” multiple exercise areas, and “decorator features” such as carpeting, intended to keep the noise down and make cleaning easier.
“It’s a humane building,” solicitor general Graham Harle told the press during a tour of the facility, “but still not a Hilton Motel.”
The building is six floors and a basement, with a penthouse floor that houses the building’s mechanical. In height, it’s the equivalent of a 10-storey building, because some of the floors have double tiers.
With geometric blocks of heavy concrete and thin windows, the structure is large and imposing, but somehow still almost invisible to those who didn’t know it was there.
During his years working in the building, Campbell said he often talked to people who were surprised that there was a remand centre right in downtown Edmonton, close enough to be connected by tunnels to the Edmonton courthouse and the downtown police station.
Inmates who moved into the remand centre in the fall of 1979 quickly tested the bounds of the new facility.
Four inmates escaped two months after if opened, throwing a table through a fourthfloor window and climbing to freedom using a rope made of sheets. After that, five more men escaped by removing a metal window frame in a maximum security unit, squeezing out through the window and rappelling down from the cafeteria roof with sheets and blankets. Another inmate escaped while working in the loading dock by putting on a parka and simply walking away.
The escapes were embarrassing and disappointing. In early 1980, not yet six months after the centre’s opening, director George Fralick admitted its security record was “looking pretty grim,” and an additional $41,000 in renovations were planned to improve the building and fix the security problems.
Interior aspects of the centre were also reconsidered once inmates moved in.
Ping-pong tables in inmate recreation areas had to be removed within weeks, Campbell remembers. Trolleys that were initially stacked with a selection of the latest novels, self-help, and handicraft books — including Flora Rheta Schreiber’s “Sybil,” Gail Sheehy’s “Passages” and Betty Friedan’s “It Changed My Life” — were no longer left open in common areas, and the shelving later had to be abandoned altogether. Waiting-room style chairs and tables on units were replaced with indestructible heavy steel picnic tables and benches, bolted firmly to the floor.
A grated roof over the downstairs exercise yard had to be changed to smaller mesh because people were throwing hollowed-out eggs packed with drugs in to inmates. Screened windows in the top-floor exercise yard had to be blocked in with a type of Plexiglas because inmates were urinating on people — in particular, police officers — as they walked in and out of the building.
“We had to constantly make it strong, better,” says Campbell, an electrician by trade, who moved from a temporary post at Government Centre to a permanent position at the remand centre before it opened. “We worked hard every day doing maintenance on the building and repairing a lot of what inmates destroyed. It was a constant challenge.”
The first floor of the building included glassed meeting rooms for inmate visits, private rooms for meetings with lawyers, and a dingy chapel decorated with colourful handpainted murals, including Jesus with the thieves on the cross.
Upstairs, individual cells were furnished with built-in beds moulded in white and orange plastic, with orange plastic shelves affixed to the walls. Each cell also had a small table, a sink and toilet, and a yellow plastic stool.
Maximum security units were at the top of the building and on the fourth floor, women were on the fifth floor, and medical and psychiatric units on the second. Single tier ranges had room for 24 people, double bunked between 12 cells.
In the 1980s, medical dormitory units that were originally intended to be drunk tanks instead became AIDS wards, used to keep those with HIV and AIDS segregated from the general population in the early days of the epidemic.
Maintenance crews continually repainted cells to cover graffiti, only to have it appear again almost immediately. Every possible surface bears marks and scars, scratched deep with initials, gang signs, fighting words and inspirational ones. There are marijuana leaves, swastikas, guns, feathers, crosses, hearts.
Graffiti was a constant problem outside the remand centre as well, Campbell says, with the sidewalks and fences constantly filling with messages to inmates. Sometimes people would bring children to draw pictures in chalk on the ground for their mothers or fathers inside.
“‘Hello,’ ‘happy birthday,’ ‘I love you,’ phone numbers, it was constant,” Campbell says, adding that some women were still leaving messages after the centre was closed, and inmates had been moved away. “We had to go out and tell them, ‘They’re not here anymore.’”
On the ground in the empty parking lot, a message remains chalked in yellow: ‘Will U marry me?”
Others sent messages in different ways. Campbell says there were often women outside baring their breasts — and more. Sometimes women passing by would flash the building if they heard inmates banging on the windows.
Tessier moved to a position with the Edmonton Remand Centre seven years ago after running remand centres in Calgary and Whitehorse, and has worked in correctional facilities for more than 30 years.
“Inmates are always bringing out the innovative part of your personality. They break stuff, we figure out how to fix it. ...
It keeps you busy, keeps you thinking.” Jim tessi er, facilities manager for Alberta Infrastructure
“It’s a challenge,” he says. “Inmates are always bringing out the innovative part of your personality. They break stuff, we figure out how to fix it. I always liked remands and jails. I’m not afraid of them. It keeps you busy, keeps you thinking.”
When inmates were no longer able to smoke inside the centre, the resourceful and/or desperate started making their own cigarettes using nicotine patches and shreds of carpet fibre, rolled up in pages of the Bible.
As authorities tried to deal with the illicit activity, staff had to ensure there was no way inmates could generate a spark inside the facility. That meant removing electrical outlets from common areas, and Campbell devised a special metal cover for the light switches to prevent inmates from jamming paper clips inside to make a spark.“That was quite an issue for a while,” he says. “We were always having to keep ahead of them. Or sometimes behind them.”
Routine maintenance on the building often turned up contraband, whether liquor made from orange peels, shivs and shanks from whatever could be sharpened, and ropes woven out of sheets or fabric.
“Sometimes they were beautifully woven,” Campbell says. “They would even make them out of toilet paper. If you weave it enough, you can make it strong.”
There were fights, riots, violence, deaths. Some inmates found escape from the walls through suicide, hanging themselves with a shoelace or a towel. Others died from drugs or of natural causes.
The centre’s first murder was the death of Todd Stevenson, a jailhouse artist who was beaten to death inside his cell in Unit 4B in the fall of 2005. A homicide detective told a fatality inquiry the 40-yearold was killed over a $40 debt, but there wasn’t enough evidence to lay charges against the suspect. Stevenson was in the centre awaiting trial on dangerous driving and theft charges.
The centre’s only other homicide happened in May 2011, when 59-year-old Barry Stewart was stomped to death by his mentally disturbed cellmate, Justin Somers. Somers, 25, was later found not criminally responsible for the crime. Stewart had been serving one day in jail for jaywalking and trespassing fines.
In the early years, inmates at the Edmonton Remand Centre were tested with computers and classified into certain personality types. Low-risk offenders were “Items” and “Easys,” alcohol-related offenders were “Bakers,” nonviolent, introverted and eccentric inmates were “Jupiters,” and aggressive or predatory offenders as “Foxtrots.”
Speaking to the Journal early in 1980, remand centre psychologist Dennis Ewanyk said the key to a peaceful institution was simple: “Never mix Foxtrots and Jupiters.”
But with the rise of gangs, dividing inmates by personality type was less important than keeping members of rival factions separate, a juggling act that became more complex with each passing year.
Originally planned to house 300-350 inmates, by 1991 the remand centre was holding 560. By the 2000s, the population swelled to well over 700 and, at times, almost to 800, with inmates double- and sometimes triple-bunking inside cells, or staying in crowded overflow dorms that had taken over old storage rooms in the basement.
As the centre’s population rose, conditions deteriorated, tensions increased, and serious complaints about the facility mounted.
“There is no comparable place for tension. The crowding is a public safety issue. There are some of the most dangerous people in Alberta in the remand centre, people who can’t be together without violence.” DAN MACLENNAN, CORRECTIONAL OFFICER. 2004
In 2001, a group of inmates took legal action alleging that their constitutional rights were violated by the poor conditions, and some judges started giving inmates triple credit for their time in the remand centre.
“It is an anomaly of our justice system that a person who is presumed in law to be innocent is jailed in conditions that are much worse than any conditions that person will face if eventually found guilty,” said Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Joanne Veit in 2004.
One inmate said in a sworn statement that daily life on Unit 4A was “far worse than disciplinary segregation at any penitentiary,” and Alberta Hospital psychiatrist William Friend described the centre’s mental health unit it as “a hellhole and something that one could only imagine existing in a repressive regime elsewhere in the world.”
By 2004, Dan MacLennan, then-president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, said the Edmonton Remand Centre was “a powder keg.”
“There is no comparable place for tension,” said MacLennan, himself a correctional officer. “The crowding is a public safety issue. There are some of the most dangerous people in Alberta in the remand centre, people who can’t be together without violence.”
While some changes were made to improve conditions and alleviate the pressure inside the institution, it became increasingly clear another facility was needed. In 2006, then-premier Ralph Klein announced plans for a new remand centre to be built.
The $580-million state-ofthe-art facility at 184th Avenue and 127th Street opened earlier this year. It has 1,952 beds, and the capacity to be expanded to hold nearly 3,000 inmates. The facility uses a “direct supervision” model that puts inmates and guards in closer contact. There are no in-person visits from friends and family, and the remote location outside the city has eliminated the previous contact with people beyond the walls.
Inmates were transferred to the new centre in April. On the last day at the downtown building, many urinated on their mattresses as a final farewell.
Today, the old Edmonton Remand Centre sits empty, its fate yet to be decided. Campbell says it’s a well-built and well-maintained building, but its use is very specific. It’s hard to imagine how it could be redesigned into anything else.
For now, the building is being kept running and in good repair. The electricity is on. A leaky pipe is fixed, the water mopped up from the floor.
“It would be unfortunate to see it torn down because it is in good repair, ” says Tessier, standing on the outside steps. “But unfortunately, it is a jail.”
The building smells the same way it has always smelled, an acrid mix of sweat, metal, dust and industrial cleanser.
In the units, picnic tables and benches sit unused, wires hang out of walls where telephones used to be.
Shredded remnants of pictures are still pasted to the bunks with toothpaste. There are bikini-clad Sun girls, women from diet and underwear advertisements, Rhianna in a scanty outfit. On one bunk in a basement dormitory cell, there is a message clipped from a newspaper: “I want freedom.”
At the guard’s Central Command station, a bank of security monitors flicker behind an unused chair, each screen showing only empty cells and deserted corridors.