Her Majesty’s Penitentiary

by | Oct 20, 2015 | 1 comment

HMP Gate
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I felt like I was walking into another world as they brought us into the cells of St. John’s Lockup. It was a dark and dirty looking place, with a long concrete hallway, the cells lining one side. I was scared to death and was suddenly filled with regret. I should have just done my time at the detention center. I should have behaved myself. I should not have ended up here…

Jim and I were placed in a cell together which was a relief. There was a top and bottom bunk on one wall and a steel toilet with a sink built into the top at the end of the cell. Once the door slammed shut behind us the guard asked if we smoked, and then brought us in tobacco, cigarette papers and matches. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad. Unlike the boys home, the thought of lighting a fire with the matches was never considered. This place was scary, and I for one had full intentions of doing exactly what I was told. There would be no trouble here.

We had no idea how long we were going to be in lockup. The detention center was going to be closed for a while, that was a given. However, we were juveniles serving juvenile sentences, so legally we could not be kept in an adult facility, and lockup was a short term thing. They couldn’t keep us in here forever, but there really was no where else for them to put us. I suspected we were heading to the pen eventually and we became quite vocal about that being where we wanted to go. It sounded cool – going to the pen. However the thought of it was just about enough to send me into a panic attack. 

Lockup was, above all other things, boring. The guards brought in books from their small collection and we read. Within a few days it became hard to get anything new to read. So, what do you do when you are fifteen years old, bored out of your skull, and already filled with self-loathing? First you carve your initials in the walls and on the cell bars with plastic cutlery. You peel at the paint on the walls which has a hundred years worth of layers to extract. You sleep until you can’t sleep anymore. You pace the three steps from one end of the cell to the other hundreds of times hoping that you will get tired and again be able to sleep. For me, the main activity was trying to find a way not to think, when really that was all that there was to do. Thinking… about being stuck in this cell. About where I was heading next. About all of the stupid things I had done that brought me here. Missing my family. Feeling guilty about all that I had put them through. Shame, guilt, regret – which would turn into rage. I would pace the floor with my mind spinning, punching the walls, the pain calming me a little each time I jabeed at the concrete. I paced until sweat poured off of me and my knees hurt, getting lost in the rage like a drug.

We were there for about a week when Jim mentioned the game called “Chicken”. I admitted that I had never heard of it, so he explained that you each held your forearms together, dropped a lit cigarette between them and whoever pulled away first was the chicken.

Sounded fun to me!

The problem with us playing this game was that neither one of us would pull away. We ended up sitting there, the smell of burning flesh stinking up the cell, a cigarette burning away at both of our arms. To be honest, the pain went away after a minute of so and you no longer felt it. So we would do it again. Then we decided that five burned dots would be cool, (like the jailhouse tattoo that meant “I did time in jail” which would later be added to my left hand) and so we kept re-positioning the cigarette until we had five dots like those on dice burned into our left arms. Soon we had large seeping holes burned in both arms, right and left, and even began doubting smokes in each others palms. Eventually we just smoked cigarettes and then doubted them in our own palms.

There were cameras in the cells, and eventually the guards got curious as to why we were huddled up at the end of the bottom bunk where the cameras could not see what we were doing. One of them came in to find out and I can only imagine what went through that guards mind when he saw the damage we had done to ourselves.

We were brought to the hospital (the Janeway Children’s Hospital where little kids ran away frightened of us as we were escorted in with handcuffs and shackles on) where I was informed that I had second and third degree burns. They cleaned and bandaged the burns and sent us back to lockup. This time we were not placed in the same cell together.

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We were in lockup for about two weeks. Then one afternoon they came to get us, informing us that we were going to the pen. I am not sure which was greater: My fear of going there, or the relief I felt from finally getting out of lockup.

I figured the pen had to be better than this hell hole, and was a little excited about it. What could be more cool than going to the pen at fifteen! I would feel much differently when I actually got there though. 

Her Majesty’s Penitentiary was the most frightening building I had ever seen. First there was the huge concrete wall, decorated on top by coiled razor wire. Then the huge gate that opened and then slid shut behind us, leaving me with a sinking feeling in my stomach and all of a sudden this was for real. This felt very much like forever.

The building in front of me was the oldest looking structure I had ever seen outside of horror movies. It’s barred windows looked like rows of angry eyes glaring out from a rough, grey face. I suddenly felt very young, very small.

I didn’t speak much as the cops took Jim and I into the front door of the prison. My body was shaking uncontrollably and I was afraid that my legs were going to fail me. They led us into the head warders office, and just before we got there I heard someone call my name. I turned to see Chuck, a guy I had met in lockup the week before and who had helped me learn how to roll a decent cigarette with papers. 

“Finally made it to the big house eh?” He asked smiling.

“Yeah.” I mumbled, grinning nervously. I again had the feeling that this was going to be forever – I’d never get out of this place again. I hadn’t even been sentenced yet but that didn’t matter. This had to be hell and hell was forever.

After we had been brought to the laundry room in the basement to get clothes and bedding, we were taken to the West Wing and shown to our cells. Our range consisting of a narrow corridor with six cells along one side, the opposite side having windows looking out over the wall and Quidi Vidi Lake. The bars on the windows were very old, shaped in a square grid and the windows had bedsheets stuffed in them all along the bottom. A sergeant who had come up with us from downstairs immediately began to remove the bedsheets and then I could see exactly what purpose they served: The window frames were all warped and didn’t come close to closing tightly. There were huge gaps everywhere and as soon as they were taken out wind and snow started blowing through them into the range. 

For a while the West Wing felt like being on a camping trip. We had a tea kettle, television and bread and jam whenever we wanted it, which was a lot better than the detention center. We only saw the guards when they did counts, which was fine with me. And with the gate at the end of the range locked we were safe. 

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© Telegram file photo – Her Majesty’s Penitentiary in St. John’s.

There were four ranges in the wing, one at each corner with the stairway in the middle heading downstairs to the main floor. For a while the gate on our range was always locked, as it was supposed to be. But before long some guards would forget or simply let it slide, and the gate would be left open so we could wander around the prison during recreation time, or just around the west wing. Soon we hated being locked down and would constantly bug the guards who didn’t leave the gate open to do so. Before long our gate was hardly ever locked and we were free to mingle with the general population. 

A couple of days after arriving someone asked me if I had gotten any “Paulsie Power” yet. I had no clue what this meant, and was told that Dr. Paulsie was the pen shrink who I would likely be seeing soon. When I saw him if I gave him a story about being depressed and not able to sleep (making the symptoms as severe as possible) he would prescribe me sleeping pills and “relaxers”. Then when I saw him the following week I would tell him that the medication was not working at all, that I still couldn’t sleep and have violent dreams just can’t handle being in this place at all. He would then prescribe something stronger. Each week you claim that the mediation is not helping and he will continue giving you stronger medication until eventually he refuses to prescribe anything stronger. It sounded a little far fetched at first until I saw how much medication was actually dished out every day and how many inmates were on meds.  So I gave it a shot. 

It worked.

The whole point of course was to save up your pills until you had enough to get high. The stronger they were the less you had to save. You could also sell your pills to other inmates for tobacco which was always short as you were issued two pouches a week only, so had to come up with ways to get more if you smoked as much as I did. 

I soon learned how to hold pills in the back of my throat while the guards checked my mouth to make sure I had swallowed them. As I walked away I would just cough them back up into my mouth and add them to my stash. A riskier method was to hold the pills between your fingers and pretend to pop them into your mouth. This didn’t always work well though, and if you got caught saving them you would get your pills crushed before they were given to you, dumped into your cup of water to drink in front of the guard. That would mean your only method of saving them would be to spit the whole mess into a coffee jar. Yes, we would spit crushed pills and water into a jar for days at a time and then chug the whole disgusting mess to get high. You know you need a buzz when.

It didn’t take me long to settle in and get into the swing of things. Now that I had been introduced to Paulsie Power, it became my main focus – how to get high sooner rather than later. Of course as I settled in and got used to things, I started getting into trouble and would soon find out that there were worse places in the jail to be than in the West Wing.

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