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'Intractable' - a vivid insider's perspective

By Robyn Lincoln - posted Tuesday, 17 April 2007


Regular readers of On Line Opinion will recognise Bernie Matthews as a frequent contributor. His columns have covered important social justice issues: from the “killing fields” of Queensland’s prisons, through the forensic use of DNA technology, to his exposés of wrongful conviction cases.

Matthews’ work, spanning three decades, has been prolific and powerful, especially in his indefatigable endeavours to present the problems of incarceration and injustice to mainstream media. This is a huge achievement given our penchant to ignore inmates and disregard what happens behind the ever-creeping razor wire.

Indeed Matthews was the very first “ex-prisoner to be admitted into the Australian Journalists Association” in the early 1990s. He recently graduated with a degree in mass communication from the University of Southern Queensland and has won several media awards for his work. Thus his passion for prisons is underpinned by sound professional credentials. All this passion, professionalism and personal experience is evidenced in his recent full length book.

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Intractable describes Katingal Special Security Unit - Australia’s first super-max prison which opened in 1975 inside Sydney’s Long Bay Jail and which thankfully had an ingloriously brief tenure in New South Wales penal history. His 408-page tome across 14 chapters with a swag of end materials, was published in October last year but officially launched at Parliament House in Sydney by the Honorable Dr Meredith Burgman earlier this year.

Matthews is in a prime position to describe “hell”, as the subtitle calls Katingal. At 22 years of age he was classified as “intractable” and was among the first, and eventually its longest serving inmate, spending 1,000 days there before seeing “daylight again”. The “tracs” were anyone who escaped or tried to escape, rioted, assaulted a prison officer, or committed other serious breaches.

But as Matthews says, “prison authorities used the classification as an arbitrary sanction to isolate and brutalise prisoners who were deemed uncontrollable in the mainstream prison population”. It was applied to the worst 1 per cent of male prisoners at the then-horrific Grafton Gaol - which was about 20 inmates - who were “incorrigible, recalcitrant [and] beyond redemption”.

Katingal comprised 40 cells measuring 1.5 metres each in eight blocks that were colour-coded and had spy holes for surveillance. It was characterised by sensory deprivation and physical control which Matthews labels an “electronic zoo”. Its name allegedly derives from one of the Aboriginal languages and refers to a traditional practice of social isolation for those who had contravened customary law.

As criminologist Paul Wilson notes in the epilogue, the Nagle Royal Commission slammed Katingal as a “failed experiment” that was “ill-conceived” from the start. It had “a lack of sunlight and fresh air, inadequate or nonexistent employment [that] all led to hunger strikes, attempted suicides, and a general sense of alienation and despair among those entombed” within it. It was closed after 2 years 8 months and eventually demolished last year.

This book though is more than a history of a single correctional facility. It provides the background on what had gone before, as well as an analysis of the legacies of a place like Katingal. It also includes excellent descriptions of the state’s prisons from youth detention centres like Yasmar and Mt Penang to Tamworth, Grafton, Maitland and Parramatta. It begins at Grafton in 1943 when it housed its first group of “tracs”. Having read this book I now have a true sense of the “evil” of this carcereal hell, its repercussions, and its links to prisons today.

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It is also a highly personalised account, for I learned about Bernie, his family and early life. In one scenario he describes how his mother defended his juvenile exploits and said he was “never going to end up inside”, but events showed otherwise with his early break and enter offences landing him in juvenile detention at the age of 15.

The book’s acknowledgements give testimony to Bernie’s many friendships over the long term - a wide mix of “crims” and “squareheads” in his jargon. It also highlights the vagaries of justice or the porous line that separates crims and non-crims. Bernie describes how he was once sentenced to 28 days solitary confinement by Chief Stipendiary Magistrate Murray Farquhar who later was convicted himself of perverting the course of justice and given five years in custody at Long Bay - “karma” the book says.

Matthews writes of other “legendary characters” such as Darcy Dugan, Lenny Lawson, Raymond Denning, Fred Harbecke and Neddy Smith. There is a cast of hundreds from crims to screws, and a dramatic litany of events such as bashings, receptions, escape attempts, revenge attacks, deaths in custody, crime planning, as well as discussion of the Bathurst riots in the 1970s that explores the links to similar upheavals in corrections in the UK, France, Germany, New Zealand and the USA. There are also many themes canvassed like the culture of prison violence, as well as the helplessness and vulnerabilities of inmates.

The chapters do not provide pleasant reading, because they document plenty of beatings where “my kidneys and lower back exploded as one of the screws slammed his baton into me”; humiliations as “batons rained down” over his naked body for a “nude man is totally vulnerable”; and much name calling with “maggot” being one of the gentler epithets shouted at the screws - and all of that is just from a page or two!

On the other hand it is also a rollicking good yarn. There are some humorous stories that reveal the seductive aspects of juvenile offending as Matthews talks of the “heart-pumping adventure where the excitement of defeating security guards and burglar alarms far out-weighed the prospect of getting caught. It was like a game of cat and mouse and the victor took the spoils”.

It is also replete with colourful language, imaginative sayings or the argot of the criminal subculture such as “a dingo’s breakfast” or “cold as a frog’s tog” and for that, potential readers will be grateful that there is an extensive glossary.

Clearly, it is very fast moving and sometimes mentally taxing as it lurches from armed robberies to prison escape plans to horrific beatings to reminiscences about soberly fronting up to the visiting prison justices.

Above all, though, its honesty is manifest - for Matthews discloses his own levels of brutality about incidents where he stabbed or bit screws, as well as acknowledging the psychological consequences to victims of armed robberies that he might have been involved in.

It is hard to imagine the relatively ancient and austere atmosphere of the prison infrastructure just a few decades ago when Matthews was housed in the quarters previously used for newly-transported female convicts. Now with massive prison rebuilds such overcrowded and unsanitary conditions are no longer paramount as media depictions paint prisons cells as being “motel-like”. In reality of course, the horrendous conditions are not far from the surface in time and space.

And given the recent announcement by the Queensland Government of a giant new prison precinct at Gatton (for 300 women, 500 men plus hospice facilities for elderly prisoners) valued at $500 million, many of the issues raised in Bernie’s book require some serious re-visiting.

Super-max prisons, like many of our criminal justice options, are imported concepts from the US and unfortunately we don’t know much about them. One survey has been conducted to reveal that even in the US such facilities were rare only 20 years ago, but have now spread to 44 states, where inmates are confined alone for all but one hour a day.

According to this research such facilities are three times more expensive than other prisons, and there is disagreement about whether they help thwart gang formation, riots, recidivism, escapes or generally act as successful deterrents to crime.

Intractable demonstrates otherwise and should help to resolve this academic debate. Matthews’ analysis shows that those inmates who went in as monsters invariably came out as worse monsters, and that the legacies of super-max prisons live on for decades.

Our current correctional landscape still operates under “get tough” rules. The facilities are highly militaristic, they often house inmates in solitary confinement and they focus on warehousing rather than rehabilitation (despite the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the treatment of prisoners).

One can only concur with Justice Michael Kirby in his foreword, who says “Bernie Matthews gives us a vivid insider’s perspective” and that any kind of imprisonment “offends basic human dignity”. For these two reasons Intractable is invaluable.

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Intractable: Hell has a name: Katingal, life inside Australia’s first super-max prison by Bernie Matthews. Published by Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2006 ($32.95).



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About the Author

Robyn Lincoln is Assistant Professor of Criminology in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Bond University where she has taught and researched since 1994. Her particular areas of interest are Indigenous criminal justice and forensic issues in criminology.

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Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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