Prison Life

Most hotels are pretty boring. I am both amazingly cheap (frugal?) and also love an adventure. When I had a trip to Ottawa, I found a great hostel close to the conference. The best part of the hostel is that it is in an old jail! The jail opened in 1862. The hostel opened in 1973 and Prince Phillip came to the opening.

The jail was used for all sorts of crimes from murder and theft to being homeless or poor or mentally ill. Men, women, and children all lived in this jail. Some of the children were convicted thieves (the youngest was 7) while others were even younger and children of the women in jail.

The original jail had no light, no heat, no air conditioning, no showers(!), and no bathrooms. Prisoners had buckets in their cells as toilets. The cells were tiny! My cell/room was about 3 feet by 9 feet (1m x 3m). For the first 25 years, there were no beds and prisoners slept on the floor. The current beds are the entire width of the cell and have about 3 feet left at the end to change clothes. Luggage can be slid under the bed. The hostel had to buy specially made mattresses to fit the beds. However, they were very comfortable.

The halls were designed to transfer sounds so that the guards could hear prisoners whispering. What that means now is that it is a very noisy in your room so you can hear people trying to quietly walk by. Or, if they haven’t realized how it works, you can hear their phone conversations in their room through the whole floor. Basically, it is better to wear ear plugs to sleep.

There were only three people hung here but they had a gallows as part of the jail. A truly gruesome story was that the first hanging was done in public with the outer doors opened. The slack in the rope was miscalculated so the guy didn’t die quickly from the sharp drop. It took over five minutes as he strangled to death. Canada’s last execution was in 1962.

These are called anti-suicide bars. They mounted them in the stairs (it is 9 stories tall) to prevent prisoners from committing suicide. It was believed their true purpose was to prevent guards from being killed by pushing them over the hand rails.