Big House Crew
By Peter Edwards
“Guys that don’t have anybody are preyed upon a lot.”
Lorne Campbell on prison life
It’s not unusual for prisoners to shake or even break down and blubber like babies by the time they’re fingerprinted at Millhaven super-maximum-security penitentiary. By this time, a prisoner has likely ridden for hours on a bus, with his hands cuffed together and his legs shackled to the floor. He has already passed along treeless lawns, through two nine-metre chain-link fences, each topped and linked in razor and barbed wire, and a metre-high “warning fence” that marks the outer limit of how far prisoners can walk from the exercise yard before deadly force can be used to stop them. He has also passed under guard towers, and if he looked up, he may have seen guards staring down at him, gripping machine guns.
Once he has been escorted into the mesh-lined holding cell where he’s fingerprinted, the prisoner has become an unwilling member of a community comprising 525 of Canada’s meanest, most dysfunctional men. Odds are, even if he was once the toughest kid in the class, he’s not even close to the most feared convict on his new range. Millhaven, also known as “Thrill Haven,” was Canada’s highest-security prison, and a third of the inmates were serving life terms when Campbell arrived.
Some locals and inmates believed it was built on a Native burial ground, making it forever cursed. The prison itself certainly had a nasty birth. It opened prematurely in 1971 to accommodate prisoners from nearby Kingston Penitentiary, which required an extensive cleanup after a bloody four-day riot that year.
When he was there in 1972, Satan’s Choice president Bernie Guindon saw a prisoner lead another inmate across the weight room, stop, and pull out a hidden shank (an improvised knife). It was so smooth and seemingly effortless that it looked somehow choreographed, and it took just seconds for the shank to be thrust into the inmate’s chest a dozen times. “I went, ‘Wow, quick.’ It’s just like watching television.” Guindon saw another inmate get shanked in the exercise yard after demanding pharmaceuticals from fellow prisoners. That attacker also led his prey to a spot where he had hidden a shank.
“Are you going to help?” an inmate asked. “No, he can die,” Guindon replied. “He was stealing pills.”
Like all new arrivals, Campbell first went to the assessment centre in E-Unit. He was slated for psychological and IQ testing and an audience with Dr. George Ducolon Scott. A jaunty, charismatic, terrier-like little man, Scott had the all-knowing air of someone who had borne witness at least once to almost every form of human depravity. He once told the Ottawa Citizen that he was fascinated as a boy growing up in Kingston by what he imagined lay inside the stone walls of the Kingston Prison for Women, which loomed within eyeshot of his childhood home. Somehow, the sight of the prison stirred “a deeper part of my soul,” and tantalized him with a sense of mystery—“like running into the sun; you can’t quite see what’s there.”
The doctor was in his early seventies when Campbell walked into his office, and by that time Scott had peered inside the minds of tens of thousands of prisoners. He hadn’t just asked them questions from across a desk, either. He had overseen LSD experimentation on prisoners funded by the Canadian Department of National Defence, as well as testing on the effects of shock therapy, sensory deprivation and pain tolerance. When the press caught wind
