Headingley Correctional Centre

source: State Department of Corrections. This reproduction is not represented as an official version of the materials reproduced, nor as having been made in affiliation with or with the endorsement of the respective state department of corrections for this facility.

Headingley Correctional Centre

Riots

At 10 p.m. on April 26, 1996, Headingley Correctional Centre was temporarily repossessed by inmates for 18 hours, following a prison riot that officials say was created by a feud between rival prison gangs.

Inmates roamed the cell-blocks, destroying objects in their path, setting fires, smoking up the jail, and injuring 8 guards who later required hospitalization. One guard, Earl William Deobald, escaped the prison with his "scalp hanging from his head" after he was bashed in the skull with a fire extinguisher by one of the inmates (The Globe and Mail 22 August 1997 ).

Inmates stole clubs, hammers, sticks, and hammers from the prison's workshop. While no one escaped or took others hostage, and 6 inmates surrendered to authorities, at least four prisoners, likely sex offenders, had their fingers cut off and thrown at prison guards. Some were pitched down the stairs and beaten bloody, while others were beaten with baseball bats. According to the Winnipeg Free Press, the floor after the riot was a litter of broken glass, blood, homemade weapons, and broken teeth. Officials believe that the Manitoba Warriors and the Indian Posse were among those prison gangs involved in the riot, but there was also involvement by a member of Los Bravos. which eventually cost more than $3.5 million in damages. 19 inmates were charged (Winnipeg Free Press April 26 2006).

Criticism was leveled at the facility's "open-door policy" following the riot, citing lax regulations, the clustering of gang members together in the basement, the freedom of movement, inmates getting beaten up every day and the occasional weight dropped on inmate's faces. There were also reports of inmates having sexual intercourse in the prison yard.

Specifically, criticism was directed at Headingley's superintendant Larry Krocker, who allegedly ignored staff safety concerns and denied the facility had a gang problem. In the same year it was known that gang leaders of the Manitoba Warriors and Indian Posses, the primary controllers of the prison drug trade at Headingley, began their spiritual prayer sessions every day at the jail with the burning of sweet grass (8 November 1996 Winnipeg Free Press). Headingley's Block 1, during the time of the riot, was considered to be a king of clubhouse for gang members, and central in the initiation of the riot. Furthermore, the Indian Posses had considerable influence at Headingley at the time of the riot, and were known to force newly admitted inmates to join by pre-initiating them with tattoos scrawled on their hands and backs. One such inmate, Alison Mayes, was 17 years old and serving a brief sentence in Headingley when he first received his Native Syndicate tattoo, a red, stylized "NS" inked into his skin by an unsterile, filed-down, red-hot paper-clip wrapped in the threads of torn bedsheets.

According to one guard interviewed by the Winnipeg Free Press, the Indian Posse creates the rules, not the guards, who are severely understaffed and unable to fully cope with the growth in gang membership. They "intimidate" the guards, and even had control at one point over the prison's liquor supply using a homemade still. The source in the Free Press stated that ''If you are not a Posse member when you go into Headingley, you soon will be.'' Similar to the attempt by the Native Syndicate to tattoo new inmates with the initials "NS," the Indian Posse pressure individuals to adopt the "I.P." and keep it there, unless the recently-forged neophyte decides he would prefer it getting carved by hand out of his back (Winnipeg Free Press April 27 1996).

One prison guard is cited in the Winnipeg Free Press as saying that the prisoners make many of their own weapons, "ingenious things" constructed out of kitchen utensils, an accesible area to fashion weapons because of the poor staff to inmate ratio.

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