History
Throughout much of the early to mid-twentieth century a break-away group of Doukhobors known as the Sons of Freedom protested against perceived government interference or injustice through acts of nudity and arson. Mountain Institution was opened in 1962 as a special provincial prison for these Sons of Freedom. Its construction, to discourage traditional burning of buildings that characterized their method of protest, consisted of all metal living units. In 1969 it became a federal prison for offenders and inmates requiring protective custody. This is no longer the case as the only federal prison in BC that has a specialized protective custody section is Kent Institution. The remaining facilities are integrated.
In 1999 the CSC undertook an extensive rebuilding of the site. It was enlarged and the old living units, which were basically of partitioned dormitory style, were torn down and replaced with three modern 60-unit buildings. Also replaced were the dining hall/kitchen, school, health-care and other institutional facilities.
Mountain Institution has a rated capacity of 480 inmates and, as of 2012, had an inmate count of 391. There are additionally 16 beds in segregation. It offers several rehabilitation programs for offenders including violence prevention, sex offender and substance abuse programming.
In November 2010, Jeremy Phillips (33) was murdered by his cellmate, serial killer Michael Wayne McGray. Inmate McGray plead guilty to the crime a year later. This was his seventh murder conviction though he boasted of 10 others.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)