Johnny Young: petty criminal was Canada's first habitual offender

  Johnny Young was the first Canadian to be kept in prison for the simple reason that he had already been kept in prison many times before.
   Young was Canada's first habitual criminal, a law passed in 1947.
   Young was a wrestler and a bar bouncer and launched a career in petty crime in 1935 by stealing tires at age 23.
   He was busted for theft again the next year, assault the year after that, disturbing the peace the next year.
   Within the next couple of years he arrested for assault, gun possession, dealing wartime ration coupons, and attempted theft.
   He was also part of the gang that - along with Percy Rodriguez - wrecked a barber shop on St. Catherine St in the aim of rigging an election in 1945. He was acquitted.
   Young fled his St. Denis Street apartment on Sept. 26, 1949 when he got wind that his arrest was imminent and cops found a stash of guns and 50 ounces of heroin along with a list of local addicts.
  Young was thereafter described as a drug kingpin in one article which also named in the head of the Perrault Gang, which was linked to an East End 1948 robbery that left two police officers dead.      Justice Wilfrid Lazure classified him as a habitual criminal, Canada's first, on April 13, 1950. He attempted an unsuccessful appeal 11 months later.
  He was sentenced to five years in prison but after five years he was still inside St. Vincent de Paul penitentiary as a habitual criminal. He remained in prison until at least 1966 and likely well beyond.
   In 1956 - nine years after the federal legislation was passed - Young remained the only Canadian with the habitual criminal designation, as Quebec judges refused two other requests to designate criminals in that category.
   Under the law Young had to wait three years between appeals of his habitual criminal status.
   The Dangerous offender designation remains on the books in Canada but is usually given only to serious criminals.
   The John Howard Society criticized the original legislation, noting that it aimed at punishing sexual psychopaths, without providing a good definition of what that entailed. Nothing in the newspapers indicates that Young's committed sexual assaults.
   Montreal Standard reporter Mavis Gallant wrote her final article for the paper about young. She went on to some fame as a writer living in Paris.
  She later said of the case.

The publicity he received made it sound almost an honour. Actually, he was a minor lawbreaker, more of a nuisance to society than a serious threat. One of his early convictions, as I remember it, had been for stealing tires and trying to sell them on the black market. “Black market” means it happened in wartime, making it, in his case, a juvenile offence. Young was barely educated and said to be not overly intelligent – though it is often hard to measure the capacity of an untrained, underdeveloped, and inarticulate mind. He knew nothing about the new law and perhaps did not understand that it had been applied retroactively. His brief notoriety must have come as a surprise. There was no legal precedent and there had been no warning – at any rate, none that could have sifted down to his street.

  I have not seen the Gallant article (if anybody stumbles across it on the microfilm please scan and send it) but she notes that she was not permitted to interview her subject but ended up describing a man who was raised in poverty, crime and ignorance in a poor part of English Montreal.
   Young was still in prison in 1966 and was reportedly being kept in solitary confinement due to his inability to get along with other prisoners. Surprisingly little else has been written about this groundbreaking chapter of Canadian criminal penal history.