The harsh lessons of Christmas in B Block, Sir David Longlands

“Remember when they drove through the front gate at Boggo Road in the garbage truck?” Merv chuckled.

“Who was that bloke ... McHardie? ... McWilliams? . . . McSweeney? That’s him. McSweeney.”

Merv’s face came alight at his own ability to remember a name from over a decade ago.

“Yeah that’s the bloke. McSweeney. And they pinched him up in Toowoomba. Channel Seven was there when he got pinched. That Frank Warrick. Yeah ... I remember ... and he escaped again. He ended up getting shot the next time.”

Merv was an accomplished jail yard raconteur with a treasure trove of memories. Some reckon he could talk under water with a mouthful of marbles. And maybe he could.

Merv recounted jail-yard stories about incidents and legends that have been handed down through generations of jail time in a place where years are only remembered by the events that happened inside the walls. Some are funny. And some are not so funny. Some are true and some are not so true. Merv knews them all.

Old Merv has rubbed shoulders with some of the hardest men on any prison exercise yard but his memory of those men and their exploits sometimes got blurred with his own pain.

It was the pain of a man with acute myeloid leukaemia. Terminal cancer. A pain that complemented the mind-altering chemotherapeutic drugs that forced Merv’s memory chip to go on the blink every now and again.

Once the fog lifted from his tortured mind the crystal-clear clarity of yesteryear returned with another story. And they all have the same unmistakable ring of truth to them. The truth of a man who knows what he is talking about. It was all that Merv had left. Jail-yard memories.

Old Merv was not a killer. Or a serial rapist. And I don’t think he’s ever robbed a bank. Merv was just an old knockabout. A "boob head". Part of the regular flotsam and jetsam that float through Australia’s prison system every year. He was a "boob head" who had notched up a few receiving charges (32 in fact) and was faced with a terminal sentence that a Court of Criminal Appeal could not reverse.

Merv’s life-expectancy was terminal. Some said he had less than a year. He had become another statistic in the law-and-order game that dominated Queensland politics. He was the human face on a roulette wheel of prison policy that claimed a mandate to protect the community from violent offenders even though “receiving stolen goods” has not reached the Public Enemy Number One stage yet - at least not by Queensland standards.

Merv’s voice interrupted my critical analysis.