Chris Clarkson and Melissa Munn, Disruptive Prisoners: Resistance, Reform, and the New Deal (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021)

Chris Clarkson’s and Melissa Munn’s Disruptive Prisoners combines their interdisciplinary expertise as a historian and as a criminologist to re-examine the golden era of prison reform in Canada, from the 1930s to 1960s, through the eyes of prisoners as written in the penal press. Munn is the operator of the Penal Press (penalpress.com), which holds the Gaucher/Munn penal press collection. The open-access collection is comprised of dozens of issues of prisoner press publications from the 1950s to the 1990s, with most of the collection concentrated around the 1950s and mid-1960s. It is with this extensive collection, alongside memoirs, administrative records, and verbatim warden conference proceedings, that Clarkson and Munn reexamine the New Deal era in the Penitentiary Service.

The pair writes with a cohesive voice, and considering the polyvocal and collective biographical approach they take towards their writing, this is impressive. The authors use a social history approach to write a prison history from the bottom up, and they succeed in centring the perspectives of prisoners. Clarkson’s and Munn’s reconstitution and connection method to social history contextualize prisoners’ actions and reactions within broader social and political trends in Canada, which positions prisoner histories in conversation with the civilian world. The authors feature long quotations from prisoners’ writings to elucidate their criticisms of prison reform and to offer insights into the experience of prison that differ from the administrative histories previously written from official documents and materials authored by prison administrations.

The book is organized into two parts. The introduction follows a forward by Robert Gaucher, who collected many of the penal press publications studied over his long career as an activist and scholar. Part 1 focuses on contextualizing the circumstances that led to the Royal Commission to investigate the Penal System, also known as the Archambault Report. The first chapter focuses on the 1932 riot in Kingston Penitentiary, and the second chapter focuses on the process, scope, recommendations, and reception of the Archambault Commission and Report. Part 2 of the book examines the contrasts, often stark, between the intentions of reforms and the realities of practices in prisons during the New Deal era. To do this, Chapter 3 examines the origins of the penal press across Canada and the discussions surrounding its introduction amongst the Commissioner of Penitentiaries and his senior staff. The following chapter compares the recommendations of the Archambault Report to the practices in prisons through prisoners’ experiences of these reforms. Chapter 5 explores the complicated system of remission and the development of a new parole system by the end of the 1950s. Additionally, Clarkson and Munn created flowcharts that illuminate the convoluted process of an application for remission as well as potential remission calculations. These visuals clarify dizzying information that confused even those tasked with studying it for the 1954 Fauteux Report. The sixth and final chapter brings the conversation back to the penal press. It examines the tensions created by censorship and prison administration interference with prisoner editorial teams, such as the removal of office space and the eventual collapse of most prisoner press magazines by the mid-1960s.

Disruptive Prisoners makes excellent use of the Gaucher/Munn penal press collection in multiple ways beyond using the words of prisoners to centre their experiences. The text is complemented by the rich inclusion of images from various publications. Images include photographs taken by prisoners, including scenes of (seemingly) staged officer and prisoner interactions, drawings and cartoons, and full-page copies, which provide a real feel for the magazines. There are also photographs from the Penitentiary Museum collection showing the printing space of the Tele-scope at Kingston Penitentiary. The inclusion of visuals from prisoners further supports the polyvocal approach taken by expanding our understanding of prisoners’ voices beyond only written communication.

However, the prisoners’ voices that feature most frequently are those who wrote memoirs. Tim Buck, secretary of the Communist Party of Canada; Oswald Withrow, a physician and birth control activist incarcerated for abortion; and André Dion, founding editor of Pen-O-Rama, feature the most of all prisoners. These three men wrote memoirs detailing their experiences of incarceration in the 1930s, late 1920s, and 1950s, respectively. Buck and Withrow differed in the nature of their crimes from their fellow prisoners generally, and the three authors likely differed in their backgrounds due to their professions and writing abilities, but it is difficult to know this from reading Disruptive Prisoners alone.

In their introduction, Clarkson and Munn are clear about the limitations of which prisoners can be heard through the penal press. Namely, women prisoners and Francophone prisoners are seldom mentioned as most publications feature English writers, and women incarcerated at the Prison for Women contributed only small sections to the Tele-scope at nearby Kingston Penitentiary during this period. Chapter 5 mentions that women’s experiences of remission will also be examined, yet only one sentence is included to describe their interactions with the remission service. While the authors are clear about who they do not include and why, they are less clear about who was incarcerated at this time. A section describing who comprised the federal prison population generally in this period would have been beneficial. It would be fascinating to know how prisoners saw themselves collectively. This would have also strengthened their suggestions in Chapter 5 that some prisoners were privileged over others in accessing parole due to their communities, whether it was their family, friends, or otherwise, who were on the outside lobbying for their release since some communities held more power than others.

The decision to leave the authors’ explicit position on the success or failure of prison reform in early 20th-century Canada until the conclusion is different but works very well in this instance, again revealing the commitment of Clarkson and Munn to centre prisoners’ voices. Their conclusion, which finds “that reform is ‘all a con,’” (207) brings together the theoretical influences that underpin the rest of the book in a candid manner. Borrowing from Foucault, Rusche and Kirchheimer, Goffman, Cohen, and Malthiesen, they find that prisons remain consistent regardless of reform. Clarkson and Munn conclude with reports from the Office of the Correctional Investigator which detail how problems similar to those of the 1930s to the 1960s in federal prisons remain today. Clarkson and Munn have written a new prison history and successfully show the nuances of Canadian prisons and certain prisoners’ experiences of them, while maintaining that prisons absorb reforms into their existent structure to uphold a liberal-capitalist order. Overall, this is an exciting and fantastic book for those who are interested in Canadian prison history as well as those interested in histories from below.

Katie-Marie McNeill

Queen’s University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2022v89.0018.