The Fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island was an important settlement in New France. Prisoners were detained there in rooms that amounted to little more than dungeons, and similar jails were built during the eighteenth century at MontrΘal and QuΘbec City. These places satisfied two necessary functions: they punished the inmates and they protected the public from criminals. Prisoners were confined together in a stone room where they often lay chained on the straw-covered floor. They suffered severely from the cold and fell victim to contagious diseases such as cholera and dysentery. Seasoned criminals were imprisoned in the same room as young offenders, debtors, the mentally ill, drunks, and indigents.
The refurbished Louisbourg jail shown here is located across the passageway from the chapel in the King's Bastion Barracks, built in the 1720s and 1730s. It was largely in an effort to eliminate the physical and moral harm of such treatment that nineteenth-century reformers argued new theories of prison management.
