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

by Phelps, James

  Contraband has also been smuggled into the jail in lettuce (a mobile was found in a salad on its way into Supermax in 2001); sardine tins (again, a mobile, but this time headed into the Silverwater’s Metropolitan Remand and Reception Centre); and, of course, by way of tennis ball, the old Slazenger pegged over prison walls packing drugs, SIM cards and miniature mobile phones.

  Here is a list of contraband seized from visitors during a 16-month period, ending in 2009:

  GUNS: loaded and cocked 9mm pistol with 15 rounds; a .22 Ruger rifle and ammunition

  KNIVES: 15, ranging from a flick knife to a 50-centimetre meat clever

  DRUGS: heroin, cannabis, ecstasy, ice, methadone, horse tranquilisers and antidepressants

  CASH: $8465.64

  DRUG PARAPHERNALIA: 150 needles, bongs, 100 deal bags and electronic scales

  ALCOHOL: three Bacardi Breezers, seven West Coast Coolers, a bottle of Bundaberg rum, vodka and a wine

  OTHER CONTRABAND: five pornographic DVDs, curry powder, two fake IDs, body lotion and lip gloss.

  Oh, and then there was this find …

  Snakes on a … Pillow

  ‘This is a random cell search,’ the officer said to the young prisoner who was serving 15 years for a string of armed robberies and assaults. ‘Do you have any contraband in here?’

  The young inmate shrugged. ‘Nah, none in here, chief – I’m all sweet.’

  The officer looked around: bed, TV, a shelf, neatly folded clothes, white property tub.

  ‘Mate, what’s in that tub?’ the officer asked.

  The inmate shrugged again. ‘Just me legal stuff. Letters and files, you know?’

  The officer nodded. ‘So you wouldn’t mind opening it for me?’

  The inmate shrugged no more, this time jumping to his feet.

  ‘Nah, chief,’ he said, now wide awake. ‘Like I said – it’s legal stuff. You know? It’s private.’

  Gotcha. What you hiding in here then … Drugs? Phones? Let’s find out.

  ‘I’m going to have to take a peek,’ the officer said. ‘I won’t read anything or disturb the files if it is what you say.’

  The inmate reluctantly moved away, clearing a path to the plastic tub, which was about half a metre wide and 30 centimetres high.

  The officer unbuckled the plastic latch on the side and pulled off the lid.

  ‘Jesus!’ he shouted, jumping back. His desperate reverse lunge knocked both the inmate and himself to the floor. ‘You are fucking kidding me, right.’ He was still on the floor but bum-sliding further away from the box.

  ‘He had two brown snakes in his cell,’ said a current Goulburn guard of the incident. ‘The poor bloke who found it shit himself. It was just a run-of-the-mill property check.’

  Now on his feet, but still safely away from the slithering, hissing box, the officer addressed the inmate. ‘Mate, they are brown snakes. Venomous, the mostly deadly snakes in Australia – why do you have them?’

  ‘They’re me mates,’ he said, returning to his trademark shrug. ‘My pets. They keep me company. They can’t be dangerous. I sleep with them every night.’

  The guard shook his head.

  ‘Where did you get them from?’ he continued. ‘How did you get them into your cell?’

  The inmate smiled. ‘Found them in the activities yard. At the back of the oval, over the hill. I just slipped ’em up my sleeve and brought them in here. I didn’t think it was a big deal. They aren’t buggin’ anyone.’

  The guard shook his head. Then shook it again. And again. And again …

  ‘They were only babies, probably only as long as his forearm,’ the guard privy to the find recalled. ‘He had brought them back to his room and put them in a property tub. He packed it with some grass and gum leaves and was feeding them insects.

  ‘Can you believe the bloke had actually been sleeping with them? He’d had them for about three weeks until we found them. They were small, but even as babies they could have killed him. He was in there for 15 years, and he was a pretty dangerous crim, but not as dangerous as those snakes though … What an idiot.’

  Ice, Ice, Baby

  The inmate swung … but his shiv slashed nothing but air.

  ‘Yeah – cop that, cunt,’ he said.

  He slashed again, this time falling over, his face following his fist into floor.

  ‘How do you like that?’ he demanded, his victim apparently the concrete ground.

  He eyeballed the floor.

  ‘Ready to die? Here it comes.’

  He drove the shiv into cement.

  ‘There was one case last year in B Wing where six blokes got paid a shitload of ice to put it on somebody,’ said a Goulburn officer. ‘But the dickheads took the ice before they did the job and completely botched it. We were pissing ourselves when we reviewed it, because they all went in and stabbed nothing but Easter bunnies. They were tripping over themselves and punching walls. You had a bunch of blokes trying to attack a guy that had already gone. It happened in the showers and they got caught, of course; they were still stabbing Santa when we got there. They were too fucked up to carry it through.’

  Welcome to the wacky world of ice and inmates …

  Several officers interviewed for this book claim that ice has become a prison epidemic, with the drug readily available in all New South Wales jails, thanks to a legislation amendment that stops prison officers from properly searching inmates – particularly where the sun don’t shine.

  ‘Ice is the big thing at the moment,’ said a current Goulburn officer. ‘I’m not sure if it’s because it gives a good kick or because it’s cheap, but in the last 12 months it’s coming in such an amount that we can’t keep track of it. We are regularly seizing the drug, in up to eight-gram packages. But when you’re finding a lot, you know there is a lot more that you’re not finding.’

  ‘No, keep your socks on,’ the guard yelled at an inmate. ‘Take everything off … except your socks.’

  The inmate slowly slipped off his white overalls, the standard prison-issue jumpsuit he was made to change into before visiting his friend. He then pulled down his undies, kicking them across the floor. He was now naked … except for the socks.

  ‘Stop,’ said the guard. ‘Stand right there … legs apart.’

  Another officer walked behind the inmate and bent down, his face about a metre away from the other man’s anus.

  Yuk …

  ‘Okay,’ the officer issuing orders said. ‘Slowly reach down and take off one sock at a time …’

  The kneeling officer concentrated on nothing but arse. He had to. He had to wait for that split second when the inmate would unclench his anus.

  ‘It sounds disgusting, but that is what we have to do now to find drugs on inmates returning from visits,’ an officer who conducts drug searches said. ‘We used to be able to do what we had to do to find it, but new laws have stopped us from searching cavities. We can’t go sticking fingers in and we can’t ask them to spread anything to look in a cavity. You cannot look up their arses – it’s that simple. Do-gooders complained and said it was impeding the inmate’s privacy. They said it was shameful and humiliating – and maybe it was – but it was also stopping drugs from getting into prison. Now it’s just open slather.’

  The amended Crimes (Administration of Sentences) Act 1999 details how an inmate can be searched. Section 46 states, ‘In this clause, strip search means a search of a person or of articles in possession of a person that may include; a) requiring the person to remove all of his or her clothes, and; b) an examination of the person’s body, but not of a person’s body cavities, and of clothes.’

  ‘That effectively means we can’t even ask an inmate to open his mouth,’ the guard continued. ‘If he was smart and he had drugs in his mouth, he could just refuse. Under the law there would be nothing we could do about it. The commissioner says he will change the legislation, but he hasn’t done anything yet. We are not even allowed to look under arms, because that’s techn
ically a cavity. The only thing we can do is put them in an observation cell if they refuse. So instead of saying “spread it” and having the stuff just fall out, we are made to go through all this instead. It’s beyond a joke.’

  But back to the socks …

  ‘That’s a trick we use to get around it,’ the officer said. ‘We may have seen something on a camera and we believe the crim has put something up his arse. When everything is off we lift their tackle and tell them to take one sock off at a time. When they bend over to take the sock off you get more of a spread in the arse.

  ‘If you see a bit of plastic or whatever, you give the thumbs up to the boss, and then we use a section of the law where we can use force to seize a dangerous article. We tell them to take it out. If they don’t, then we make it very uncomfortable for them. We will basically upend them and hold them there until they remove it. But using that legislation really puts us under the pump because we’ve used force on an inmate, which is a big thing. It all has to be documented and we come under scrutiny. They are taken to the medical staff to make sure they have no injuries, and it leaves us open to being charged.’

  But, even with the sock-reaching and use-of-force loophole, drugs get in.

  ‘[Inmates] go in with overalls that are tight around the wrists and ankles to try and stop them from putting anything up their sleeves,’ the guard said. ‘But they still manage to get it in and work it into their arses. Even with the ability to look in cavities, stuff still gets in. One of the reasons is just human error. In that strip-search section there are only two blokes that will search 60 guys coming in, and then search the same 60 going out. The last half of the searches aren’t going to be as good as the first half – that’s just human nature.’

  ‘Alcohol used to be a huge problem,’ the guard added, ‘but we don’t have that anymore. We used to always find bags of fermenting brew and come across drunk prisoners. But we don’t anymore because, instead of waiting five or six days for a brew to ferment and risk having it found, they can get a hit of ice; just walk into the cell next door and buy a hit. It is cheap and it is everywhere.’

  Inmates affected by ice can be extremely difficult to deal with, according to the officer.

  ‘Ice can give some men the strength of 20 bulls,’ he said. ‘And the confidence to take on an army. We have big problems getting some of them down but, in saying that, the drug also zonks others. It affects them all differently. I think an aggressive person will become more aggressive on ice and vice versa. But most people in jail are aggressive by nature.

  ‘They also become very confident. If you tell them to stop doing something they do not listen. This has all been identified on daily intelligence briefs and is spoken about on a daily basis. Searching for ice is one of the biggest priorities in the prison; unfortunately we are just very reactive at the moment.’

  Tiny Tablets

  Even harder to find, and possibly more problematic than ice, is a prescription drug called buprenorphine. Used to treat opioid dependence on the outside, the tiny little tablet has created a crisis on the inside.

  ‘Buprenorphine comes in a wafer that is about a quarter of the size of a fingernail,’ said a Goulburn officer. ‘It’s so small that they can hide it their ears, between their fingers, in their belly buttons. It’s impossible to detect.’

  Prison officials in America have admitted they are powerless to stop the drug entering their jails. It can be crushed into a paste and spread over stamps, sewn into shoes and put into the spines of magazines.

  It is also readily available and can be obtained legally and bought for a dollar a hit.

  ‘It’s a pharmaceutical drug prescribed for heroin addicts,’ the guard continued. ‘It is used in the same way as methadone; it just has a much bigger bang. People on the outside can easily get a script for the drug and, instead of taking it, they can sell it to prisoners and make a massive profit. One wafer outside is worth a dollar, and one inside is worth a $100. They divide them up in quarters, which they call a “spot”, and they sell them for $25 each. It is an unstoppable trade. Everyone is taking it, and we can’t do anything about it.’

  Jan Shuard, Commissioner for Corrections Victoria, spoke to the ABC about the drug in Victorian jails.

  ‘In the last 12 months we conducted 84,600 searches in our prisons,’ she said. ‘We did 7000 random, general urine tests. What is most concerning is 60 per cent of those tests were positive to buprenorphine. We have found strips of bup under a stamp on a letter and hidden within a matchbook, so there’s a range of ways that it can be brought in.’

  Prawns and Paper

  He slowly pulled the package from the bin.

  Is it drugs? Is it a bomb?

  ‘Whatever it was it had been wrapped neatly, with a lot of care,’ said former officer Ian Norris. ‘We were doing a sweep through that area on one particular night, and I happened to look in a garbage bin. There was a parcel in there that didn’t look quite right. It wasn’t just crumpled up newspaper or something like that. It was a newspaper parcel that had been wrapped neatly and tied up with a piece of cloth.’

  Norris was on B watch on a cool, clear night in 1996. He and a fellow officer were patrolling the outer perimeter. Like always, they paid particular attention to the historic St Saviour’s Cemetery, just beyond the prison walls to the south.

  ‘We would have a bit of a search around the jail because we would get all types hanging around,’ Norris said. ‘In the cemetery at the back, it was quite usual practice for the drug dealers to hide things. One of the places they kept things was in the rubbish bins, but they would also hide them under the gravestones, places like that.’

  That’s right. The dead don’t talk – so why not use them to help smuggle drugs into the jail? Even Captain William Hovell, the great Australian explorer who was buried in St Saviour’s in 1824, was an unknowing accomplice.

  ‘The cemetery is right behind main jail, the MPU, which was supposed to be the jail to end all jails and escape-proof,’ Norris said. ‘The minimum-security blokes used to go over there for charitable purposes, mow the lawn and generally tidy it up. They kept the cemetery in reasonable nick, and it gave them an opportunity to smuggle drugs. Dealers would come along and hide the drugs in little rabbit holes near the graves. They might dig a little hole directly under a tombstone and stick their stash there.’

  The gravestones were foolproof markers for the drug dealers.

  ‘They would give the crims a name over the phone,’ Norris said. ‘The name of a dead bloke. The crims would then just find the tombstone, pick up the stash, put it in their pocket and walk it back into jail. Plenty of drugs were found in that cemetery, and that’s why we were checking it that night.’

  Norris poked at the package with a torch.

  ‘I thought it was too big to be drugs,’ Norris said. ‘And it didn’t go “boom” when I poked it, so I didn’t think it was a bomb. But we thought we should report it and hand in the package, as that was prison protocol.’

  The shift supervisor looked at the package and said, ‘It’s a bloody bomb. Get that friggin’ thing out of here. Quick, run it back to the bin. Put it back in there before you get us all killed.’

  So Norris ran a delicate egg-and-spoon race back to the bin.

  Meanwhile, the night senior was calling the bomb squad a few hours away in Sydney. They packed their equipment into their blast-proof van and hit the road.

  ‘They didn’t arrive until 3 o’clock in the morning,’ Norris said. ‘They unloaded all their gear and went in to expect.’

  Soon the bomb disposal robot was armed, showing its muscle by firing a shot into the bin.

  Boom.

  ‘It rained prawns,’ Norris said. ‘There was no bomb in the package, of course, and that is what I’d told the night senior when he suggested it was a bomb. The blast from the robot ripped the bin to pieces and sent prawn shells flying. God knows why anybody would do it, but someone had neatly wrapped up all these prawn shells and an e
mpty can of Coke, and thrown the package in the bin.’

  Needless to say the bomb boys were not impressed. Neither was the Department of Corrective Services when they were given the bill for blasting the bin.

  ‘The night senior basically dumped all the blame on us,’ Norris said. ‘Nothing was mentioned about the officer in the gate claiming it was a bomb. Nothing was mentioned about the night senior telling us to take it back. The whole thing was so bloody hilarious that it was stupid. It was quite an embarrassment to the jail and obviously a waste of valuable resources. I copped the blame for it, despite not doing a thing wrong.

  ‘Some good did come out of it, though. That bin was a notorious spot for hiding drugs. They shot it to shit and it was never replaced.’

  Dildos

  ‘Ah,’ said the senior guard. ‘What do we have here?’

  He held the suspected contraband in his hand, rubbing it up and down as he looked into the eyes of the inmate.

  ‘Don’t touch that, chief,’ the prisoner began to beg. ‘Please don’t touch that. Not that.’

  The officer cracked the shits.

  ‘What?’ he yelled, gripping the contraband more tightly. ‘I’ll touch whatever I damn well want to touch.’

  The inmate asked again, softer this time, a slight smirk on his face.

  ‘Chief,’ he said, ‘put it down. You don’t want to be touching that.’

  ‘And why not?’ the officer screamed, really angry now. ‘Why do you think you can tell me what I should and shouldn’t be touching?’

  The inmate frowned, smile gone.

  ‘Because it’s my dildo, chief,’ he said. ‘And I just had it up my arse.’

  The officer dropped the hard, moist object. Then he turned a bright shade of red.

  It’s not just drugs that are seized from cells. There are other types of contraband, not always lethal but certainly disgusting.

  Smelly Safe

  Shoulders back, eyes forward, she slowly edged her way to the front of the queue.