Detention Center

“Don’t even think about getting out of here. This is maximum security for juveniles,” one of the staff members told me just after I arrived at the detention center. The building was across the parking lot from the Pleasantville Training School in the area called White Hills in St. John’s. Not having the ability to see a future and feeling like I had nothing to lose anyway, I took the warning as a challenge. The cold concrete building was bare, just painted concrete wherever you looked and the cell in which I would be living was no different.  However the center was not nearly as bad as I had expected. The horrors that had brought be so close to death didn’t exist. There were only a handful of “residents” and the cells were split in two sections, with the control room in the middle, which had tinted (and I assumed bullet-proof) glass. There was a tv room, and the main area had a table and chairs where we would play cards.

When I first arrived we were only allowed out of our cells for very limited amounts of time – a couple of hours a day if I remember correctly. Most of the time we were in our cells staring at the walls, reading books and listening to the radio that was piped into the cells. They gave the residents a certain number of cigarettes per day, myself included even though I was only fourteen and the legal smoking age at the time was sixteen: Even in a government institution that law was ignored. I liked it when “smokers” were working so I could try to get a smoke from them as they let me out to go to the washroom. There were a couple who would give them to me nearly any chance they could. Most of the staff were well liked – they treated us well for the most part. They were there to enforce the rules that we were obligated to fight, so there were conflicts but most of the time it was not the staff’s fault. For the most part they really were a good bunch of people and most of them had not been around in the rougher days of the boys home, the time from which most of the exaggerated stories I had heard had spawned from: Rape and abuse and beatings.

There was the occasional fist fight, usually starting over something stupid like a card game. The stress level among the inmates was usually fairly high though, most of us being on remand, waiting to be sentenced and none of us knowing how long we were going to get and when we would be home again. Spending twenty or twenty two hours a day in a nine by nine cell did nothing to help the stress either. We were all desperate for a distraction of any kind and with the limited stimuli available, that would result in trouble of one kind or another.

For a while I was lucky enough to be in school. A teacher came into the center and they had me doing lessons that were supposed to be on par with where I actually was in school. However it was not – it was painfully boring, but it got me out of my cell. It also took me to the other side of the building where there were girls, so I looked forward to school.

I got along fairly well with the other guys, only getting into a couple of fist fights that were quickly broken up by the staff and we would be whisked away to our cells. The real trouble in the center was usually instigated by myself and my friend. We started by taking bolts out of the furniture, working on them whenever we had a chance until we could get them lose. Bolts and screws became tools for digging holes through the concrete walls between the cells, hiding the hole for a long time with our pillows and trying to dig our way out through the windows at the back of our cells. Anything destructive that we could manage, we did. The risk of getting caught gave me a rush that beat back the unending boredom.

Then one day three or four of us decided that we were going to see just how much damage we could accomplish. We beat the place up with what we could lay our hands on, each of us ending up confined to our cells, but we had bolts we had taken out of a table and started nailing the window in our doors with it until it cracked and then finally broke. I had my head stuck out through the door when a female staff member came along and grabbed my face, looked at me with fierce anger in her eyes and was obviously fighting the urge to squeeze. She just looked pissed!

We were removed from the cells, taken to the detention cells across the way in the main building until repairs could be done, each of us racking up a list of new charges most being destruction of government property. Our explanation as to why we beat the place up – Unfair Living Environment. We actually told the centers powers that be that we had full intentions of wrecking the place again unless our situation was improved. They asked us for a list of changes that we would like to see happen and we gave them one. It included more time out of our cells each day, more cigarettes, a “ghetto blaster” with tapes and some other things. They responded by asking us to make a list of cassette tapes so they would be sure to have music that we liked. I was amazed – we got everything that we wanted!

Things really got a lot better for us especially with a lot less cell time and and the ability to hang out and watch TV in the evenings. We went from spending almost all of our time in our cells to only a few hours a day, mainly to accommodate staff lunches when there were less people in the control room and during shift changes. If we weren’t in school we spent the mornings in our cells, but everyone always slept through that anyway.

Being young and stupid, it wasn’t long before we beat the place up again and lost most of what we had gained, starting with the decreased cell time.

It was October when I arrived at the detention center and it still was when I escaped for the first time, laughing afterwards about the staff member’s whole speal about it being “Maximum Security.” It was an easy escape – through the fire exit door. My buddy held in the push bar while I ran and kicked the door high up, as close as I could get to the electric lock mechanism. The door popped open and quickly swung shut again on the first test attempt, and we just looked at each other in amazement before scrambling away from the door. We were expecting alarms to sound inside the control room and the staff to come running in. Neither happened. I wasn’t sure if it was because the door has swung shut again so quickly or if the alarm just wasn’t working, but it didn’t matter – we knew now that we could get out, and the second attempt was no test run. We ran through the door and over the fence without looking back. Down the hill into St. John’s we went, dressed for summer with rugby pants and t-shirts on a cold October day. We didn’t even have footwear – just sock feet, but we didn’t care.

We were gone quite a while before the staff finally realized that we had infact escaped. They came out at smoke time with our cigarettes and asked the others where we were. “They escaped,” one of the guys told them. “Yeah right. Tell them if they want their cigarettes they will have to come get them.” A little while later we still hadn’t shown up for our smokes, so they looked around in the very few spots we could be hiding. “We told you they escaped,” they were told again. “Holy fuck! Are you serious?”

They had such confidence in their security system they really had trouble believing that anyone could escape.