Australia's Most Murderous Prison: Behind the Walls of Goulburn Jail

by Phelps, James

  The next time Chisholm would see Steele, the prisoner would be dead.

  ‘It was a complete shock,’ he said. ‘We had no idea he would hurt himself. We were worried about others, not him. It’s the prison death that has affected me the most. It was such a sad tale, and I still think about it now.’

  Why?

  Former prison officer Dave Farrell attempted to explain Goulburn Jail’s unprecedented deaths:

  ‘I picked up the command in Goulburn in 1996, and all the killings were just happening when I arrived. I was in charge of the whole region as a commander. It was just a bad mix of prisoners with conflicts that intel didn’t know about. They were out to kill their enemies if they had the chance – and some of them did. It was all internal politics among the criminals. Some of them didn’t have the intention to use the shiv; they would arm themselves for protection. But if they got the opportunity, then they would also use it to attack.

  ‘It was very rare to have all those killings at once, but it was a case of having all the shit in one place at one time – blokes who didn’t blink at murdering someone else.’

  Pain in the Arse

  ‘Ahhhhh! AHHHHH!’

  The painful scream broke the night’s silence, the raw terror bouncing off the concrete and escaping through the bars.

  ‘Help me, for fuck’s sake! Someone FUCKING HELP ME!’

  Inmates sprung from their beds; some were concerned for the man in pain.

  ‘Chief,’ one yelled. ‘Chief, quick, I think someone’s getting ’emselves killed!’

  Others were more worried about their sleep: ‘Shut the fuck up, or I’ll give you something that really hurts!’

  The wing was soon thundering, the noise summonsing the reluctant night guard.

  ‘Boss, you better come take a look at this,’ said the night supervisor over the phone.

  Governor Chisholm walked into the cell.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said, looking at all the blood. The inmate was naked from the waist down, and blood was coming from his anus. ‘What the hell do we have here?’

  The inmate, still in extraordinary pain, attempted to explain to the boss why he wasn’t wearing pants and why he had blood gushing from his arse.

  ‘Ah, fuck,’ he said. ‘Fuck. Fuck. Ah, I was getting up to have a piss and I – ah fuck, fuck, ah fuck, it hurts – and I slipped and something on the bed ripped open my arse.’

  Chisholm looked at the bed. It was all blankets and mattress. For obvious reasons, there were no sharp bits, jutting metal or inmate-impaling poles.

  ‘Oh, really?’ Chisholm asked. ‘You slipped and the mattress went up your arse?’

  ‘Ah!’ the inmate screamed. ‘Ah. Yeah. Na. Fucked if I know. It just happened. Look at me – do you think I would do this to myself?’

  Chisholm shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, not on purpose. I reckon you may have gone looking for something that we’ve been trying to find all day. Did you get it out?’

  ‘There had been a stabbing earlier in the day,’ Chisholm recalled. ‘It could have very easily been another death in the Killing Fields. It wasn’t with what you would call a small shiv, and we thought it would be pretty easy to find. You really need to find the shiv or it makes it very difficult to nail someone for a stabbing in the yard. There are just too many people around for the officers to see it, and the cameras can’t pick it up. It’s not like out on the street where you would have witnesses come forward. Crims have a code of silence.’

  The search, a thorough one at that, failed to find the weapon.

  ‘It had vanished,’ Chisholm continued. ‘It wasn’t in the yard, which was locked down as soon as it happened. We couldn’t work out where it could have gone.’

  It wasn’t in the drains. Not in the gutters. Not in the rubbish bins.

  ‘We had no idea until later that night,’ Chisholm said, ‘when we walked into the cell and saw all the blood.’

  Yep, that’s right – the prison yard attacker had hidden a piece of serrated steel up his arse. He had then gone to muster, ate dinner, had a shower and watched some TV, all the while with the shiv lodged in his rectum.

  ‘That night he decided he needed to get it out,’ Chisholm said. ‘But the idiot had put it up there the wrong way. He had shoved it up blade-first and sliced his arse open when he stuck his fingers in to take it out.’

  Chisholm did not buy the falling-on-the-bed-and-cutting-the-inside-of-my-arse story for a moment.

  ‘We knew what had really happened,’ Chisholm said. ‘It was obvious. He refused to tell us and we said the doctor would not be able to treat him properly unless he came clean. We said the doctor would not look for internal bleeding if he gave him the slipping story.’

  The inmate soon produced a blade, big and bloody.

  ‘He was a brave man putting it up there,’ Chisholm said. ‘A real shame for him that he did it for nothing and was caught red-handed, so to speak.’

  Soon the deaths in the Killing Fields stopped, however. And it was all thanks to an accidental apartheid …

  3

  APARTHEID

  The Potato Protest

  ‘Nup,’ barked the Aboriginal inmate. ‘Not eating. Take it back. I’ll eat it when it’s brought to me by one of me own. I’d rather starve than take anything from another whitefella.’

  And so the seed of an idea was sewn that would eventually be slammed as an apartheid …

  Night senior Kevin Camberwell confronted the prison superintendent. ‘They won’t eat. They want to have their own sweeper – a black sweeper – and they won’t take their meals until it is served to them by a Koori.’

  ‘Well,’ the boss said, frowning, ‘what do you think?’

  The veteran guard, put on the spot, replied, ‘Let’s give them their own wing. It will solve the problem we have right now and – who knows? – it might solve a few more.’

  The boss nodded. That just might work.

  Camberwell said he made the suggestion that would eventually become a policy: ‘I suggested we could move all remand prisoners [those awaiting trial] into C Wing and put the Aboriginal blokes in D Wing. That way they would have their own wing and the problem would be solved. At that time the remand was in D Wing because it backed onto the Reception Centre [a prison wing that houses fresh inmates before they are moved to a permanent cell], but there was no reason it could not be moved.

  ‘So they took the Aboriginal prisoners all out and put them in D Wing. It was ultimately the superintendent’s decision, and we just thought it would be easy to swap them over to stop them from starving.

  ‘After that we just turned around and said, “Here is your own wing. You can do whatever you want now. Sort out your issues amongst yourselves here.”’

  Soon Goulburn became less violent, the killings stopped and the number of bashings, standovers and stabbings dramatically dropped.

  ‘It wasn’t what we intended,’ said Camberwell. ‘But, yeah, the violence decreased. It was because the Aboriginal blokes were always causing a lot of trouble in the main jail, standing over other inmates. They were always a cause of the violence. They would stand over guys just for the sake of it. It could have been for shoes or something even more stupid. They were the guys that always had nothing, so they would take whatever they wanted. They would take whatever they could get.’

  Camberwell said the Aboriginal inmates, however, would not stand over each other: ‘None of them had anything worth taking. It solved a lot of problems.’

  However, soon there were demands from others – first the Anglos and then the Islanders. Then the Middle Eastern inmates followed suit, and eventually the Chinese.

  ‘Why are they so special?’ inmates would ask. ‘Why do they get their own wing? Give us the same.’

  ‘They would threaten similar strikes, threaten to go off,’ Camberwell said. ‘What we had done so far was working, so we started the process of segregating the rest of them into different yards.’

  A current guard explained how
the inmates are split: ‘There are four big wings in the prison,’ he said. ‘A, B, C and D. The two big wings are C and D, and they are divided up into four yards with roughly 30 inmates in each. One of those yards is called the Koori Yard, and that is where the Aboriginal inmates are kept. The others are called the Lebanese Yard, the Islander Yard and the Asian Yard. The Anglos can be placed in any of the yards. The yards all face onto each other and are separated by fences and razor wire.’

  Racist?

  Thus, in 1998, Goulburn unofficially became the only jail in Australia to racially segregate inmates. However, Kevin Camberwell is adamant the practice was never meant to be a policy: ‘It was just a quick fix to stop the Aboriginal fellas from starving.’

  The controversial move would be credited with ending the murderous Killing Fields period. It would also be condemned for sparking Goulburn’s worst ever riot.

  The practice was not made an official policy until 2002 when the Department of Corrective Services publicly revealed that the different ethnic groups were being isolated into separate yards.

  A department spokesman said the policy, called ‘ethnic clustering’, had been introduced as a strategic move adopted to prevent violence and make difficult inmates more easily managed.

  On 24 February 2005, just over two years after the Department of Corrective Services admitted to the policy of racial clustering in Goulburn, the US Supreme Court weighed in on the matter of racial segregation in prisons in both Texas and California, slamming the policy as both racist and of limited benefit.

  In California, inmates were being assigned to a cell with a fellow inmate of the same race. The segregation was temporary, up to 60 days, and only put in place when necessary because a prisoner was a gang member or otherwise antagonistic towards to members of another race.

  ‘We rejected the notion that separate can ever be equal 50 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education, and we refuse to resurrect it today,’ Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said. ‘When government officers are permitted to use race as a proxy for gang membership and violence without demonstrating a compelling government interest and proving that their means are narrowly tailored, society as a whole suffers.’

  When the case was launched, US Solicitor General Paul Clement said the government could not separate people based on skin colour without the strongest of reasons.

  Both he and the Supreme Court made repeated reference to the landmark American racism case of Brown v. Board of Education that held that racial segregation in ‘separate but equal’ schools was unconstitutional, including a 1968 decision barring blanket segregation in prisons.

  So racial segregation in prisons – the same controversial practice still in place in Goulburn Jail in 2015 – was ordered to be abolished in Texas and in California in 2005.

  Kevin Camberwell shrugs his shoulders and simply says the system works. ‘It’s good for that jail. For whatever reason, they just can’t mix together at Goulburn because they’ll end up fighting. It’s hard to explain because you will send the same prisoners that are fighting [in Goulburn Jail] to Lithgow Jail, and they will mix with everyone.

  ‘Goulburn has its own culture. They were climbing over each other for control. The different races … It was always a problem. They mixed with their own people better than anyone else, and that became a solution.

  ‘It was just a case of them getting along better that way. They were a lot happier, and a lot happier to deal with. It’s hard to say why it works – it just does.’

  Former second-in-charge of New South Wales prisons Dave Farrell agrees: ‘It certainly brought the harm down. But if you’re a young Aboriginal and you were chucked in against ten or fifteen whitefellas, how would you feel? Some of them couldn’t even speak English. They had certain benefits. I couldn’t see any dramas with that. I know some people were offended by it, but we were keeping them, hopefully, within a harmonious environment.

  ‘If you ask yourself the question, If I was a young Aboriginal guy, who would I want to be with? you would have to answer that you would want to be with your own. You’re always going to have power struggles in jail, but they are more manageable this way.’

  Most people who have worked at Goulburn Jail agree that the system of racial segregation works. Who would argue differently after the policy put an end to the Killing Fields?

  Former Goulburn governor Allan Chisholm would, and he did – in the strongest possible way.

  ‘That was one of my big issues,’ Chisholm said. ‘New South Wales prisons actually practised apartheid. That really gave me the shits. It was apartheid, pure and simple. That is all it can be when you separate all the inmates by race.

  ‘It was already implemented before I got there, and there was nothing I could do to change it. It was, among other things, a union issue. It should have been stopped back then, and it certainly still shouldn’t be going in this day and age.’

  Former head of the New South Wales Department of Corrective Services Tony Vinson AM, the academic hired to implement the recommendations put forward by the Nagle Royal Commission into New South Wales Prisons in 1978, was also critical of the policy.

  ‘There have always been segregation units,’ Vinson, now a renowned social scientist and lecturer at the University of Sydney, said. ‘Someone would be put in segregation for bad manners, or whatever. A Supreme Court judge declared that segregation as a means of extra punishment was inconsistent with the act. I did introduce the requirement that every prisoner put into segregation would be given a document to describe the reason for segregation. This would mean the prisoner would have something he could use to get legal assistance if it was wrongful segregation.

  ‘Segregation is an issue, but when it comes to racial segregation, well, when I heard about this years later, I thought it was a terrible mistake. I knew it would increase violence.

  ‘I have been in the best of jails, and one of the hallmarks of them is respect between the prisoners. You need to have an incubator of tolerance. I don’t think people on the outside give a bugger about what’s happening inside. We should be doing something about it because it’s institutional racism. Among the people in the community who care, who would raise a concern … well, they probably have higher priorities. As far as elected politicians are concerned, the last thing they want to be accused of is any kind of softening of conditions in prisons, or any sympathy for particular groups.

  ‘For example, the issue of the high proportion of Aboriginal prisoners, which is horrible, only gets crocodile tears annually. Racial segregation is a dreadful policy, and that’s about all I can say about it.’

  In 2002, the Sydney Morning Herald obtained an internal Corrective Services report that warned the practice of racial segregation ‘only increases group tension’ and is ‘in nobody’s best interest’. Prepared by a departmental policy advisor, the report slammed the jail’s management policies as ‘schizophrenic’ and compared the prison to something out of George Orwell’s novel 1984.

  ‘Some staff in key positions reflect a siege mentality and are totally convinced that any attempt to manage inmates other than in ethnically clustered groups will end in bloodshed,’ the report said. ‘Unless there is a commitment to meaningful change at Goulburn, it will remain the jail of last resort.’

  A spokesman for the prisoners’ advocacy group Justice Action told the Herald that the jail was run by a ‘divide and conquer’ technique designed to let prisoners live in fear of each other. This, the spokesman claimed, increased the power of prison officers and directed the antagonism of inmates against each other, rather than the guards.

  A disturbance in March 2000, resulting in charges against 30 Aboriginal men, was also blamed on the policy. The Goulburn Local Court heard that frustrations over racial segregation and hatred, which had been building for months, had led Aboriginal prisoners to trash their cells.

  ‘Some feel as though they are treated like animals,’ said one of the inmate’s representatives. ‘The regime they live under is dif
ficult to tolerate and [they] have responded in a destructive fashion. It has become a system of retribution and vengeance, rather than rehabilitation. They suffer daily, intolerable psychological abuse.’

  And soon they would hit out. Oh, would they ever …

  4

  RIOTS

  Remembering

  Tim Swain shuts his eyes and shakes his fist. ‘Come on, brain,’ he stutters.

  His head follows his hand: rocking back and then forward, back and then forward. A twitching nod at first, the movement becomes faster, angrier: back, forward, back, forward. Then harder, more violent: back, forward, back, forward.

  Brain smacking into skull: back, forward, back, forward. He can’t shake himself to sense.

  ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Gone.’

  Now his head is sadly still. He looks across the dining table, over the coffee he proudly made minutes before. Both the jubilation he found in being able to make a Nescafé – a spoon-and-sugar act he has only just reintroduced to his morning show – and the neck-flinging frustration of not being able to find a word are gone.

  ‘Far-out,’ he says, defeated. ‘That day … It’s hard.’

  Small and slight of frame, he struggles not just to speak over sips of coffee about the day that ruined his life, but just to speak. Swain is a whisper of the man he was when he walked into Goulburn Correctional Centre on 16 April 2002 to begin, of all things, an overtime shift.

  ‘I might not look it,’ Swain says, ‘but I was a very fit man. I loved – loooved – bikes. I raced them. I did … you know … come on, brain … the … the … wait, got it: the Canberra to Goulburn.’

  Swain fumbles through a pile of newspaper clippings he has pulled from a folder once manila, now aged brown. He smiles and then points.

  ‘See,’ he beams, ‘that’s me.’