Susanna Moodie's Brown Commission Report

Kingston Penitentiary, the first penitentiary in Canada, began accepting inmates in 1835 (J. Miron, personal communication, January 22, 2018). The widespread abuse and torture that took place was eventually revealed in the 1849 Brown Commission Report, which signified the beginning of a new penal regime with a focus on moral reform, rehabilitation, and reintegration into society (J. Miron, personal communication, January 22, 2018). Susanna Moodie was aware of and in agreement of this shift in penal attitudes and prison reform (J. Miron, personal communication, January 22, 2018). Moodie was a non-fiction writer and poet who was born in 1803 in England and emigrated to Canada in 1832 (Ballstadt, 1982). The document, Life in the Clearings Versus
263). The excerpt from Susanna Moodie’s Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush reveals the unique power relations inside Kingston Penitentiary, which may also be representative of other penitentiaries during this period that also followed the Auburn State congregate model. Moodie (1853), recounts her astonishment that “forty or fifty strong active looking men, unfettered, with the free use of their limbs, could be controlled by one person” (p. 209). Although not mentioned, guards in Kingston Penitentiary were known to exert their authority through coercive force rather than respectful authoritative measures (J. Miron, personal communication, January 22, 2018). Moodie (1853) does not mention the horrendous punishment that the inmates would receive after disobeying orders, and assumes “that a word or a look from [the guard] was sufficient to keep them at work” (p. 209). Despite this, the power structure of the prison seemed to exploit the inmates “want of moral courage” (Moodie, 1853, p. 209) by using specialized architecture and inhumane punishments to force the inmates into submission. During her visit, she describes the “neatness, cleanliness, order, and regularity” (Moodie, 1853, p. 209) of the building, proving the
Miron, personal communication, January 22, 2018). Susanna Moodie (1853) declares that she “felt a greater curiosity to see the convicts than the prison which contained them” (p. 208). Her fascination allowed her to give a detailed depiction of mid-nineteenth century life in the Kingston Penitentiary from the point of view of a privileged English immigrant. As a result, Moodie’s (1853) descriptions focused on the most eye-catching “stolid, heavy-looking men…many with black, jealous, fiery-looking eyes, in whose gloomy depths suspicion and revenge seemed to lurk” (p. 212-213); as if criminality could be outwardly observed. Her descriptions may be over exaggerated and unrepresentative of the prison population, however, her career as a short-story writer and poet has allowed her to describe the inmates in such a way to capture the reader’s attention. Although Moodie does not illustrate the experiences of the inmates from their perspective, she attempts to understand and share with us her thoughts on their motivations and personalities of the inmates that she encounters. By vividly describing the inmates she meets, she avoids portraying them as an anonymous, “faceless entity,” as described by Ted McCoy (2012, p. 265), which can be of great value to the