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On a sunny day in May 1980, several hundred dignitaries, prison officials, custody officers and their families gathered in the British Columbia Penitentiary's prison yard. The event was the New Westminster institution's official closing ceremony. In fact, it had been three months since the last prisoners had been transferred out of the facility, but it seemed necessary that last words be said before the 102-yearold prison fell to the wrecker's ball. The closure of the facility did not disappoint nearby residents. During the 1970s, the institution was one of the most violent federal prisons in Canada. It seemed that the prisoners, not the authorities, frequently controlled the events within the 30-foot concrete walls. More than once, prison riots threatened to spill out onto the streets. Yet violence was nothing new to British Columbia Penitentiary: generations earlier, assaults, and murders were threads sewn into the fabric of prison history. The first death of a British Columbia Penitentiary employee was in 1912, during an attempted escape. The incident resulted in the only execution of a prisoner ever to take place within the penitentiary grounds.
The late afternoon sun was little more than a patch of light shimmering in the autumn sky. On Saturday October 5, 1912, twenty-seven prisoners lifted heavy sledgehammers over their shoulders and brought them down on the piles of rock that filled the wooden stalls located in the eastern section of the prison yard. All prisoners within the institution were expected to work during their incarceration. However, the difficult and seemingly futile labour of the rockcrushing gang was simply meant as punishment. All the men assigned to break granite were regarded as institutional troublemakers or potential escapees. One such gang member was 24-year-old Joseph Smith who was serving ten years for the robbery of a Vancouver jewelry store. During the holdup attempt, he had thrown ammonia in the eyes of the storeowner. Smith was a short, powerfully built young man who had escaped from the penitentiary ten months earlier. His freedom was brief, however-he was caught only hours after his breakout. Another rock crusher was 22-year-old Herman Wilson who had earlier been caught smuggling a metal bar into one of the shops. Like Smith, Wilson was serving a ten-year sentence for robbery.
The...