From reluctant recruit to Kingston Penitentiary warden: Donna Morrin’s life in corrections
When Donna Morrin first met the warden of Kingston Penitentiary (KP) in 1977, she remembers taking one look at the imposing figure and thinking it was the last job in the world she would ever want.
Only 25 years later, that job became hers.
By the time she became warden of one of Canada’s most storied and challenging correctional institutions, Donna had already spent decades working her way through the federal correctional system, navigating everything from the integration of women into traditionally male institutions to disturbances, hostage risks, murders and suicides on the job.
“I didn’t initially choose to work here,” she says. “I just found corrections to be really fascinating.”
Her long career began by accident. After completing her undergraduate degree at Queen’s University in 1975, Donna planned to attend teacher’s college and eventually coach basketball. While looking for a summer job, she landed a term position as a clerk with the National Parole Board in Ottawa.
By the end of the summer, she decided teaching could wait.
She moved into the National Parole Service, became a community parole officer and eventually worked inside the former Prison for Women in Kingston.
What appealed to her were the people on both sides of the bars. No two days were ever alike, and neither were the people. As she moved into senior management, the scope became even broader.
“You work with technical services, food services, security and health care,” she says. “There was a lot of variation and a lot of challenge.”
There were also barriers. Corrections in the 1970s remained overwhelmingly male, and women were only beginning to take frontline positions in men’s institutions.
Donna initially found management opportunities at the Prison for Women before moving to Collins Bay Institution in 1984 as a supervisor during a difficult period when female correctional officers were being introduced onto the ranges.
By 1989, she was deputy warden of the Prison for Women, then Canada’s only federal penitentiary for women. It was an institution struggling with a fundamental problem: policies and practices had largely been designed around male inmates.
Even the approved items for inmates’ personal property reflected it. A supposedly gender-neutral policy might allow only one earring per inmate, Donna recalls, because it had been written with men in mind.
More profound questions surrounded pregnant inmates and new mothers. Women sometimes gave birth while still incarcerated, requiring two officers to accompany them to hospital. Donna remembers staff sitting beside new mothers and their babies for extended periods. Eventually, an isolation room in the institutional hospital was transformed into a small nursery.
Those years also changed the way Donna viewed corrections. She credits Mary Cassidy, a former warden and colleague, with helping pioneer more thoughtful approaches to incarcerated women.
“A lot of people who work in the service don’t peel the onion back to see the inmate as a person rather than someone convicted of a crime,” Donna says.
From there came another striking transition: deputy warden at maximum-security Millhaven Institution.
In some ways, she found working with maximum-security men easier.
“These guys were the hard-core criminals, and they knew right from wrong,” she says. They could be volatile and required tighter controls, but expectations were often clearer.
After Millhaven came Joyceville Institution, where Donna became warden for seven years. It was there that she developed a conviction that followed her throughout management: successes inside a prison belong largely to frontline employees.
“The success of anything that happens in a prison is almost never due to management,” she says. “It’s staff, because they are the ones who deal with inmates on a daily basis.”
When she moved to KP, she brought several trusted employees with her.
KP was different. Built of solid limestone, with antiquated cell blocks and open-bar cells, it was not designed for modern corrections. Its population included maximum-security inmates, men requiring protective custody, people with significant mental-health needs and inmates who could no longer be safely managed elsewhere.
“It was probably my favourite jail and the most challenging jail,” Donna says.
Managing such an institution also showed her how dramatically corrections had evolved. Earlier decades were characterized by more immediate physical intervention, but now she was witnessing staff who relied first on communication and negotiation.
“One of the biggest changes I saw over the years was moving from a reactionary response, where you go in and take control, to negotiation,” she says. “You can save a lot of time and effort and eliminate the possibility of people getting hurt.”
That intensity inevitably followed Donna home.
Imprisonment as we know it in Canada today dates back to the building of the Kingston Penitentiary in 1835.
She and her husband, Peter, were raising two children at a time when an early morning phone call could mean a murder, suicide or major disturbance.
One morning, the phone rang around 7 am as the children were eating breakfast. There had been a murder on one of the ranges.
Donna had to leave immediately.
“I said, ‘Are you guys okay walking to school? I’ve got a problem,’” she recalls.
Her children, then around 12 and 14, assured her they could handle it. Donna did not return home until about 8 p.m.
“I walked in the door and the kids both leaned back and said, ‘Hi Mom. How was your murder?’”
It was an unusually matter-of-fact question that reflected their day-to-day reality. But Donna made a deliberate effort to ensure corrections did not define her children’s world, taking five months off work to travel around the world with them in 2004.
They began in Japan and continued through Korea, China, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and Laos, travelling with backpacks and renting a camper along the way.
After 38 years, Donna retired from CSC in January 2013, but retirement has hardly slowed her down. She conducted correctional investigations in the Northwest Territories and worked internationally with Sweden’s Raoul Wallenberg Institute on human rights issues in prisons across Africa.
She has since climbed Mount Kilimanjaro four times, trekked to Everest Base Camp, completed Peru’s Inca Trail and walked more than 700 kilometres of the Camino de Santiago. She has also helped organize fundraising climbs and volunteered on medical missions in Tanzania.
Travel remains a major part of life for Donna and Peter. After recently returning from Ireland, she is now preparing for another trip down the Nile in Egypt. She is also a new grandmother, and the couple already have a pair of baby skis waiting for their grandson, once he is old enough to use them.
Today, Donna remains connected to the institution she once thought she would never lead as a founding member of the Friends of the Kingston Penitentiary Museum and an occasional volunteer.
Former inmates have crossed her path too. Some have joined the public tours she occasionally led at KP after retiring. Others, years after leaving custody, mailed her birth announcements with photographs of their children and notes saying they were doing well.
Those messages stayed with her, reminders of why, through crises, controversy and nearly four decades of institutional life, Donna remained fascinated by corrections: people could change.
And surviving the job required remembering something about herself as well.
“You have to have a sense of humour,” she says, “and not take yourself too seriously.”