Shanks, homemade tattoo machines heading to prison exhibit
Retired HMP captain lobbied for years to preserve rich prison history
On a white square of protective foam, David Harvey carefully lays out an array of plastic and metal items gathered from inside the wall's of Canada's oldest running prison.
"These are all shanks," Harvey says matter-of-factly.
"Something so small as a piece of Plexiglas like that to a sharpened toothbrush handle. It just goes to show, you can make a weapon out of pretty well anything."
Tattered and stained medical cloth and electrical tape create a handle around the bottoms of screwdrivers, rebar, toothbrush handles and box cutters — a collection of things used for personal protection by inmates.
The homemade weapons have been confiscated by correctional officers throughout the years at Her Majesty's Penitentiary, a men's provincial jail on the banks of Quidi Vidi Lake.
While they may be items some would rather forget, the efforts of one retired correctional officer will soon see them displayed for the public at Memorial University.
"There's a mass interest in them because people's impressions of this sort of weaponry have come from television," said Madeleine Mant, a Banting post-doctoral fellow at MUN's archeology department.
"To see the ingenuity of them but also some of the necessity of some of the items, to feeling like you need some kind of protection."
"Speaking of ingenuity," Harvey pipes up as he holds up a bone taken from a roast dinner that's been carved into a knife.
Curiosity created the museum
Harvey retired in July 2014, after exactly 30 years on the job. But, every month or so, he visits the basement of HMP's administration building; a two-storey white house, just outside the walls of the Victorian-era jail.
There he created a museum containing artifacts illustrating the province's sordid history of crime and punishment. The only problem was that no one knew it existed, outside of those who worked at HMP.
The project started when Harvey noticed stacks of ledgers and old cardboard boxes about two decades ago in the damp basement of the jail's gymnasium.
Harvey spent his lunch hours reading through the material, which outlined hangings, prison guards' daily diaries and death notices, all containing names and dates, never seen by anyone other than the person who wrote them.
The oldest document dates back to 1838, when the province's prison was just east of the Supreme Court on Duckworth Street in St. John's. HMP was constructed in 1859.
'Made for really good reading'
After years of pushing for the documents to be protected, the provincial archives stepped in.
"This ledger is probably one of the most damaged," conservator Miki Lee says as her gloved hands open a box containing the ledgers.
Her job was to put the crumbling pieces together like a puzzle and stabilize it so it could be copied and digitized for generations to come.
Intrigued by charges like "driving violently" and the young ages of some of the prisoners, Lee admits she was slowed down in her work.
"So as I was doing the work, I realized I had to stop reading so much and get on with my work so I would actually just scan the charges and remarks.… it made for really good reading," Lee laughed.
The project was delayed after some employees at the provincial archives at The Rooms began to get sick, she said.
After Lee ruled out mould, she asked a colleague to test it for something else.
"We sampled on the outside, inside, and spines on all of the material that we had and what came up was really high levels of arsenic, lead and copper," she said.
With some detective work, Lee discovered that those deadly elements were used in pesticides. The two sprays, Lee determined, were used back when the documents were stored at the prison in Supreme Court and when it was on Signal Hill.
One of the most important items is a doctor's notebook that includes details of executions that happened within the walls of the penitentiary.
It was that book that sparked Mant's curiosity in Harvey's collection.
"I'd been doing work with 19th-century discharge records from General Hospital and so what I kept seeing was patients coming in to the hospital from the penitentiary," Mant explained, while helping Harvey pack up his collection.
"I thought, 'What's the story there?'"
Open to the public
A friendship was formed by Harvey and Mant over a common interest in history, and sparked a partnership with Memorial University and the Department of Justice.
An exhibit will be unveiled at Queen's College on MUN's campus this fall, and Harvey stresses it will finally give the public an opportunity to see what Harvey has been holding onto all these years.
Despite handing over his collection, Harvey is quick to say he's not abandoning his work.
"Oh, I'll always be hands-on.There's always something that will be found down there that people will be amazed with."
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