UNTWISTED – Prologue

It was a summer evening in 1985. I was a convict at St. Vincent de Paul, a super maximum security penitentiary in Quebec, Canada.

The cells were securely locked for the night. The guards had completed their hourly check to make sure each prisoner was present and accounted for. As convicts like to say, “They treat you like swine and count you like pearls.”

St. Vincent de Paul was Canada’s second oldest penitentiary. It housed 1248 convicts.

The penitentiary’s original design involved six ranges that radiated like wheel spokes from a central dome. The ranges were four stories high, and on each level there was a double row of back-to-back cells, twenty-six to a side, with a narrow three-foot corridor between the rows. Only the guards used this corridor, and it could only be accessed through an internal doorway from the central dome.

Each cell had a peephole window in the back wall, and every hour on the hour a guard would walk down the narrow corridor, slide back the peephole door, and check to make sure each prisoner was in his place.

The fronts of the cells were fully barred. They faced the outer walls of the spoke and opened onto a four-foot-wide railed walkway. About thirty feet beyond the rails was a bank of twelve-foot high window panels that looked out onto the cell block yard. At night, when the world outside was black, the windows became mirrors that reflected what was going on inside the cells.

The cells themselves had five-inch thick walls and measured about six-by-nine feet. Each was furnished with a bed topped with a very thin mattress, a small table, a folding chair, a toilet, and a sink. A metal- shaded light fixture hung from the ceiling. The light was left on at all times so the guards could see you during the hourly night checks. You were also required to sleep in such a way that the light shone down on you.

The front of the cell was a door made of heavy steel bars. You could put your hands through the bars and around the narrow wall dividing the cells, thus enabling you to play chess with the guy next to you, pass books, or have a quiet conversation.

In each range, there were run-rails in front of the cells with two big brass wheels at one end. When the wheels were turned to exactly the right position, the bars of each cell door would align with holes above the door, enabling all the doors in the range to be opened at the same time. Each door had its own individual lock lever which also had to be released in order for the door to be opened, and prior to sliding the rails into place, a range runner would run down the corridor and release the lock levers. Convicts had to be ready and waiting to push their door open. If you weren’t ready, you were out of luck and had to rely on a fellow-convict to click your door lever as he went by.

The archaic heating system at St. Vincent de Paul constantly clanged and banged. Boiler radiators against the ground level walls heated all four stories of the prison range. This meant the interior was freezing in winter and unbearably hot in summer. The plumbing was equally ancient, with pipes that clanked and creaked, and seatless porcelain toilets.

Following a major prison riot in the early 1980s, which pretty much razed the prison to the ground, it was decided that St. Vincent de Paul would become one of two SHUs, or Special Handling Units, to house Canada’s most dangerous convicts. Three of the spokes were salvaged and refurbished, but only the two lower ranges were opened. This created a much smaller, more secure prison for only 312 convicts. Everything else stayed the same.

There was something almost medieval about St. Vincent de Paul. It was a depressing mass of iron and concrete that had already seen a century of use. Sounds echoed continuously in the towering corridors— harsh voices, curses, iron grating on iron. At night, in the dense silence, you could hear the pain of the current occupants and the profound agony of a myriad of restless souls who had spent interminable months and years there before.

Life in the SHU was very regimented. Guards wakened you at 6:30 in the morning and you had to be up and ready to open your door in order to go down and get your breakfast which was passed to you on a steel tray through a slot. You immediately took the tray back to your cell where they locked you in and you ate your breakfast. An hour later, they unlocked your cell so you could go and return the tray. By this time, it was about nine o’clock in the morning.

In the SHU, unless you worked in the mailbag shop or attended school, you remained locked in your cell until lunch time. The guys who worked returned to their cells at noon and the breakfast routine was repeated for lunch.

During each of these processes, you were carefully counted. Every time you left your cell or returned to it, you were counted. Each time you went to the shop, you were counted. At every doorway you passed through, you were counted.

An hour after lunch, you were allowed out of your cell to go to the yard for a couple of hours to lift weights or pound the heavy bag. Then you went back to your cell.

At supper time the guards unlocked your cell door, you collected your tray, returned to your cell, and ate your supper. An hour later, you were allowed out to return your tray.

You went back to your cell and waited a couple of hours until they cranked your door open again so you could go outside for two more hours. In summer, as long as it was daylight, you could go outside and work out; in winter, you might be confined to the common room, an area where you could go and play games or cards.

You could also go to the shower which was basically a big concrete room with rows of spigots and drains in the floor. The shower could be a dangerous place. I witnessed a killing there, and saw a man get his belly split open. For security, there was a gun cage at the end of the row where a guard with a shotgun kept watch.

Everywhere you went in the penitentiary, there were gun cages. Guards broke up fights by shooting one shot in the air and the next one into somebody.

By nine o’clock, you were back in your cell and locked up for the night.

My cell was mid-way down the range on the second tier.

Next to me was a young man named Glen. He had robbed three pizza joints with an unloaded shotgun. The whole take was about $500, but Glen was desperate. He needed the money to buy crystal meth. During his trial, he tried to escape from the courtroom holding cells by crawling into the heating ducts, but they caught him and gave him nine years.

Glen was sent to the reception unit at Millhaven Penitentiary where another convict raped him. When they let Glen out of his cell, he got a knife from a range cleaner and buried it in the chest of the guy who raped him. The courts added another sawbuck1 onto his sentence and shipped him to Quebec, to the SHU in St. Vincent de Paul, reserved for the worst and most violent offenders. He was nineteen years old, doing twenty years in a super maximum security prison.

Glen and I became pretty good pals. Both of us were English, which made us a minority in the French prison. The other connection was that Glen came from a town with which I was very familiar. During the period of time when he committed his crimes, it was my drug labs and my drug dealers that supplied his area with drugs.

Over the seven or eight months since Glen had come in, he and I talked about a lot of things. He was a nice young man, but he had many problems. Glen was born to a prostitute and had a half-dozen half-brothers and –sisters, but no father. He had been in multiple foster homes, was raped as a kid, and lived on the streets. It was not a pretty story, but one that can be retold by the majority of people in prison.

On this particular evening, the guards had made their hourly rounds and retreated to the glass-enclosed dome area on the ground floor to put in time until the next hourly inspection rolled around. The range was in secure lock-down.

I was surprised to hear the sound of fabric ripping in Glen’s cell. “Glen,” I said. “What are you doing?” He didn’t answer, but when I looked toward the windows, I could see in the reflection that Glen was tearing his bedsheets into strips and braiding them together.

I spoke to him again, but he ignored me and kept on working. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what he was doing.

“Come on, Glen,” I said. “You shouldn’t be doing this. Whatever you’re feeling will pass. Tomorrow is another day.”

He didn’t even look up.

I didn’t know what to do. My convict instincts told me I didn’t want to get him into trouble. I didn’t want the guards coming in and gassing him, or knocking him out, or putting him into the psychiatric ward. On the other hand, it was obvious that he planned to hang himself.

I watched helplessly as Glen placed his folding chair under the light fixture that was mounted with a metal brace to the nine-foot ceiling. He climbed onto the chair and tied the rope he had made to the brace.

I began screaming for the guards. But they were in the dome, a good distance away at ground floor level. Of course, they couldn’t hear me. The dome was fortified with bullet-proof glass, locked doors, and shotgun holes.

Eventually convicts on the various levels began smashing their metal cups on the bars to get the guards’ attention, but by the time they got all the multiple locks open and reached Glen’s cell, thirty minutes had passed and he was dead.

I was badly shaken by the incident. It made me rethink my own life and everything I had done to this point. I liked Glen, and in a way, I felt responsible for his death. If it hadn’t been for my drugs, Glen might not have embarked on the journey into crime that led to his death. Contemplating all this made me profoundly depressed. I was at my nadir. I had never felt lower. I saw no reason to continue living, and for the first time in my life, I considered committing suicide, too.

I decided I would do it the most painful way I could imagine—by starvation.

But death by starvation is nowhere near instantaneous. I had plenty of time to lie on my hard prison cot and ponder my life and my sorry past…