Jack Whalen is pictured in a replica of Jack’s cell he was imprisoned in at a reform school, called the Whitbourne Boys Home, run by the government of Newfoundland and Labrador.Lisa Moore
Lisa Moore is the co-author of Invisible Prisons: Jack Whalen’s Tireless Fight for Justice, which is a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-fiction.
Between the ages of 13 and 17, from 1973 to 1977, Jack Whalen was subjected to periods of solitary confinement that totalled two years at a reform school, called the Whitbourne Boys’ Home, run by the government of Newfoundland and Labrador. The longest unbroken period of solitary confinement he endured was four months. He was imprisoned in a cell that measured 1.6 metres by 2 metres – or about the space of the bed in a medium-size pickup truck.
Over the course of writing Invisible Prisons with Jack, a book about his experiences at Whitbourne, I became convinced that solitary confinement is not a deterrent against illegal behaviour and does nothing to reform incarcerated people, whether they’re children or adults.
Solitary confinement is a form of torture. Jack and his daughter and lawyer, Brittany Whalen, have been fighting hard to open the discussion about solitary confinement, and to show the long-term damage and intergenerational trauma such confinement causes. Coincidentally, my sister, lawyer Lynn Moore, had been fighting a class-action suit against the Newfoundland government for other victims from the Whitbourne Boys’ Home. She has also been simultaneously fighting a class-action suit against the government on behalf of adult prisoners held in His Majesty’s Penitentiary in St. John’s, for the unlawful amounts of time they spent in solitary confinement.
“When prisoners are admitted to His Majesty’s Penitentiary,” Lynn told me, “they are asked if there is anyone in the prison they are incompatible with.”
“Someone who is incompatible” in this context is a euphemism, for “someone who wants to kill you.” In His Majesty’s Penitentiary, there are only four or five different ranges – spaces where inmates can congregate – so if you have “incompatibles” on all the different ranges, the only place they can put you for your own safety is in solitary confinement.
Lynn explained to me that there are two kinds of solitary confinement – administrative segregation and disciplinary segregation – and that both amount to the same thing. Sometimes people are placed in administrative segregation for their own protection, or sometimes because they are deemed suicidal. This means that the lights are kept on at all times, and there is constant surveillance in administrative segregation.
“The people held in administrative segregation get more time out of their cells than those in disciplinary segregation, but not enough time to make it humane,” Lynn said.
In 2019, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that spending more than 15 days in solitary confinement causes psychological harm to the person being detained, and therefore is a violation to an individual’s Charter right against cruel or unusual punishment and should be outlawed. Unfortunately, my sister told me, people in His Majesty’s Penitentiary in Newfoundland are sometimes in solitary confinement for much longer than that through a process inmates call “gating.”
When Jack was a child in the Whitbourne Boys’ Home, he had no contact with the outside world while in solitary confinement – no contact with family or other children. He was denied an education. The guards who delivered his meals didn’t speak to him. There was no natural lighting. He had no access to television, books or clothes, other than a pair of pyjamas. There was an iron cot, the only furniture in the room. The guards took his mattress every morning so that he could not sleep during the day.
As Jack and I wrote the book that tells the story of his incarceration, isolation and many escapes, I learned about the trauma and nightmares that still haunt him: the invisible prison he carries around with him.
While we were writing the book together, Jack and his daughter Brittany – who’d decided to become a lawyer at the age of 16 when she first heard her father’s story – fought to change the statute of limitations on physical child abuse and for financial compensation in court for the physical and psychological torture Jack had endured under the care of the Newfoundland government. They were also fighting to bring to light the experience of all incarcerated children.
One day over Zoom, Jack told me he was going to build a replica of the cell with the dimensions of the one he’d been imprisoned in at Whitbourne. It would be the same size, it would be painted grey on the inside, and he’d score the walls in the same way he had as a child, marking the passing of days, only giving up when he’d been there so long that the tally made him feel hopeless.
I let the implications settle inside me. This was the cell he had spent his childhood trying to escape – the cell he found himself perpetually trapped inside even now, as an adult, during nightmares.
But I saw, too, that building the replica of the cell was another way to tell the story. It was a physical manifestation of an irrefutable truth. When it was constructed, I was afraid to get inside it. Afraid of the bolt being shoved into place. Even peering inside from the sidewalk made me feel sick.
Jack now lives most of the time in Ontario, but he built the cell in St. John’s, outside the home still owned by his family in the area called the Battery, outside the home where his mother, now deceased, had lived for much of her life. During his confinement in the Whitbourne Boys’ Home, Jack had escaped 24 times, always running back to St. John’s, to his mother’s house.
After it was finished, Jack drove the cell across Newfoundland and Labrador and over to the mainland, and all the way to Ottawa, doing interviews with media and speaking to everyone who approached him.
He met some people who had suffered similar experiences to his own, sometimes in other institutions. And at every stop, he and his family reiterated their demand that the government remove the statute of limitations on physical child abuse. This would allow victims to sue the government for compensation at any time, instead of within the allotted years imposed by the limitations, usually two years after the age of maturity. In the end, Jack and his family, and others who were advocating for the same change, succeeded in getting the Limitations Act amended. The entire House of Assembly applauded Jack’s efforts.
I believe stories are always a conversation, and the act of telling a story is an important act of democracy, of reinventing the world as we go along. We can imagine a scene in fine detail: the way shadows fall and deepen as night approaches when a child is on the run in a forest, heading east, heading home; how a guard removes an expensive watch by putting a finger under the expandable strap to make sure the watch isn’t damaged before he beats a child with his fists; the hot breath of a police dog on a child’s cheek as he lays still on the ground. The accuracy in describing how these things felt as they unfolded is just as important as the brute facts. And I believe that when readers imagine these things, we are also training our imaginations to conjure justice.
These are the things Jack experienced as a child. And they are the things he has now been able to speak about to other people, some of whom also experienced solitary confinement.
I once asked Brittany Whalen how she felt about being inside the replica of Jack’s isolation cell with her father.
“Strangely, I felt safe because my dad was by my side,” she said. “I always feel safe and secure when my dad is nearby. I wish my dad had someone to stand by him and protect him as a child lost in the system. I can’t imagine being all alone in that cell. I hope no child ever has to experience the torture of solitary confinement again.”
The paradox of solitary confinement, I’ve come to understand, is that it often locks the experience within the people who experience it. These stories are often locked away forever. It takes great courage to tell them.