By Kellah Lavoie

Sask. Pen. turns 100

Sep 21, 2011 | 5:23 PM

It was a rare celebration for a correctional institute.

Today, the Saskatchewan Penitentiary celebrated its 100th anniversary.

“(We’re) always looking for an opportunity to celebrate something like that. Celebrating anything within the corrections environment is not something that most people do or see, and for us it is extremely important,” said Don Head, commissioner for the Correctional Service of Canada.

The contributions the penitentiary makes to Prince Albert is one of the reasons the anniversary is a celebration, said Jason Hope, Saskatchewan Penitentiary warden.

“I think if you look at the penitentiary in Prince Albert as a community as a whole, this large employer, with this large of an impact socially on a community it’s very important,” he said.

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The facility deals with a variety of challenges, Head said the most prevalent is an over representation of aboriginal inmates.

They have a wide variety of programs in place to help rehabilitate inmates.

“We want to send them back out into the community as law abiding citizens,” he said.

The celebration was a chance to put all the people who work to help rehabilitate inmates, no matter what the do within the institution, on the forefront, and give them the credit they deserve, he said.

100 years of change

The facility opened on May 16, 1911 and took 36 inmates, by the end of the first year they had grown to 66.

The Saskatchewan penitentiary currently has about 175 inmates in maximum security and another 537 in medium security,” said Darcy Begrand, a probation officer.

The facility can hold between 650 and 750 inmates when it is at capacity, said Hope.

The Saskatchewan penitentiary also has about 610 staff, nearly half of which are correctional officers.

Head joked about some of the changes the facility has seen. When it opened the warden only had an annual salary of $200.

Inmate trades have changed along with the times. They now have a cabinet making shop, while in the past it was a bakery and tailor.

Challenges grow

As time goes on, so do the issues within the penitentiary.

Darcy Begrand, spokesman for Correctional Service of Canada, said one of the biggest issues staff deal with on a regular basis are compatibilities, or how well inmates can get along.

“We have to manage gang-compatibilities,” he said. “We have to manage non-gang compatibilities.”

When asked how many gangs are within the institution, he said he couldn’t come up with a number off-hand, explaining he would “probably be short.”

He said gangs in the institution gangs tend to split, he used the example if the Indian Posse and Warrior Gang.

“It can be really intense, especially if there are problems,” he said.

Other issues are gangs that pressure their members not to comply with programming and interviews, he said, such as the Terror Squad.

“It’s our job to (encourage them) not to follow that direction from their peers,” he said. “It works sometimes.”

All the different compatibilities are kept separate, leaving gangs grouped together.

Drugs within the Saskatchewan Penitentiary is a topic both on the minds of inmates and employees – employees spend their days trying to remove them, while inmates spend 24 hours a day trying to find a way to bring them in,” Begrand explained.

The penitentiary does have drug dogs and all visitors are subject to a search by the animal, he said.

Hope said the number one concern of the institution is safety, both within the penitentiary and for the surrounding community.

klavoie@panow.com