Burnaby's Oakalla Prison
Farm, was a full-service facility which opened on September 2,
1912. The first inmate was William Daley, sentenced on July 31,
1912 to serve a year of hard labor for stealing some fountain pens
valued at over $10. By April 30, 1913, some 328 prisoners had
passed through the jail's doors. From 1919 until the abolition of
the death penalty in 1959, 44 prisoners were executed by hanging on
the Oakalla site. The first execution was that of 25 year-old Alex
Ignace on August 29, 1919. Leo Mantha was the last prisoner
executed, on April 28, 1959. In 1936 there were several double and
even one triple hanging.
Thousands of prisoners passed through the doors of Oakalla
– renamed Lower Mainland Regional Correctional Centre in 1970
– before it closed on June 30, 1991. Originally designed to
house a maximum of 484 prisoners, Oakalla's population peaked in
1962-63 at 1,269 inmates. With population averages of 600-plus
overcrowding was always a problem. In the institution's final years
two nationally-spotlighted events occurred. On Nov. 22, 1983 a
violent and costly riot took place when rioters caused more than
$150,000 damage in a two-day spree. Thirteen maximum security
prisoners escaped on New Year's Day 1988 following a Dec. 27, 1987
uprising. Oakalla was replaced by the Vancouver Pretrial Services
Centre, the Fraser Regional Correctional Centre and the Surrey
Pretrial Services Centre.
From the time of Oakalla's opening, in 1912, to its closure
seventy-nine years later, the Lower Mainland Regional Correctional
Centre (as it was renamed in 1970) served three main functions.
First, it was a provincial jail for men and women serving sentences
of less than two years; second, it was a remand centre for those
awaiting trial on serious charges or appealing federal convictions;
and third, up until the final hanging of Leo Mantha in 1949,
Oakalla carried out all death sentences in the province.
Since only a portion of the prison held offenders who were
looking at lengthy sentences, or execution, it would be reasonable
to expect the jail to be less dangerous or violent than a
maximum-security federal penitentiary. This was not the case.
Throughout the decades, Oakalla had to control more than one
thousand prisoners on any given day while, at the same time, acting
as the "dumping ground" for other institutions unable to cope with
their troublesome charges. As the number of dangerous individuals
admitted to Oakalla increased, so did the levels of violence.
By the 1950s, the prison was notorious for its inmate brutality
and decrepit living conditions. Even though sweeping penal reform
was undertaken during the next twenty years, Oakalla continued to
be vastly overcrowded and infested with misery. Destruction of
prison property was equalled only by the destruction of human
lives. Further changes to correctional policy in the 1970s resulted
in most of the prisoners sitting idle on the narrow tiers, without
employment or programs. Little wonder that, over the next decade,
Oakalla was consumed by a succession of riots which nearly brought
it crumbling to the ground. In the summer of 1991, when the prison
finally closed, it left a fascinating history of turmoil and
conflict in its wake.
— From Hard Place To Do Time - The Story of Oakalla
Prison 1912-1991 by Earl Anderson
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