The crime and prison movie genre showcase only rare true successes

Burt Lancaster’s portrayal of the convicted killer Robert Stroud in The Birdman of Alcatraz illustrated the futility and counter-productivity of isolation by solitary confinement. The movie also reveals the frustration of trying to rehabilitate behind prison walls. Escape from Alcatraz and Alcatraz: The Whole Shocking Story reveal the failure of a system designed to brutalise men by isolation and solitary confinement. The end product of that brutalising system is graphically captured by the true story of Henry Young in Murder in the First (1995).

Young (Kevin Bacon) was sent to Alcatraz after he stole $5 from a convenience store/post-office resulting in his arrest for a federal offence. An attempt to escape from Alcatraz earned Young three years in solitary confinement (a stark reminder of the days when The Hole at Boggo Road Jail was used for the same purpose). Within hours of his release from solitary, Young murdered the prisoner informer responsible and was charged with murder in the First Degree. The State requested the death penalty. In a riveting journey through the incarceration process that creates men like Henry Young his subsequent murder trial became a social indictment against the entire US prison system and resulted with the subsequent closure of Alcatraz in 1962.

The story of Henry Young and Murder in the First has a chilling parallel to the current Maximum Security Units inside the Arthur Gorrie and Sir David Longland Correctional Centres at Wacol where survival in the new-age gladiator schools of the incarceration process also change young prisoners forever. Ghosts of the Civil Dead and Scum reinforce those observations of a prison system rarely revealed to the public.

In Queensland, the prison-movie genre has suffered from legislative restrictions designed to stop media access to prisons and prisoners while continuing to envelop the system in a cloak of bureaucratic secrecy. The determination of prison bosses not to allow any repeat exposés of their incarceration processes is evidenced by the embarrassment caused with the 1988 award winning ABC tele-documentary Out of Sight – Out of Mind when it revealed how Australian prisons are also failing their obligation to society.

Despite Queensland’s legislative restrictions, the Victorian and NSW prison systems have been successfully and critically dissected in Every Night Every Night and Stir.

The iconoclastic Stir, written by ex-prisoner Bob Jewson, explores the lead-up to the February 1974 Bathurst Riot that resulted in total destruction of NSW’s most brutal maximum-security jail. Jewson’s first-hand experience of life inside Bathurst Jail during that period has been successfully transposed onto the screen with devastating realism.

Every Night, Every Night adapted from a stage play written by Ray Mooney, unveils the story of H Division inside Pentridge (the Alcatraz of the Victorian prison system), where systematic and institutionalised violence was an everyday occurrence used to rehabilitate prisoners. Mooney served eight years inside Pentridge and was transferred into H Division for being a spokesman during a riot. When he refused to break rocks in the labor yards he was subjected to intolerable brutality at the hands of prison guards led by a Chief Prison Officer dubbed “Hitler”.

Mooney’s experience of H Division has been captured for posterity in the movie but the title reveals an underlying anger and hatred that illustrates the pressure-cooker syndrome slowly bubbling away until the gates of freedom are opened and it explodes on an unsuspecting society.

Mooney’s explanation of the connection between H Division and the movie title reinforce the counter-productivity of Australia’s incarceration processes:

“I coped (inside H Division) by resigning from the human race and dreamed every night of what I would do to the bastards when I got a chance.”

Mooney never returned to prison. He failed in his H Division ambition to get square with society and the prison system. Today Ray Mooney is a successful Victorian theatre director with more than 50 plays to his credit. His most recent film script The Truth Game explores the 1988 murder of two Victorian police officers in Melbourne’s Walsh Street.