AUSTRALIAN PRISONS – A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR NEW INMATES

By

Bill Bergman

Published By

William Abeleven at Smashwords

Prison Life - A Guide For New Inmates

Copyright 2012 by William Abeleven

Licence Notes

This ebook is licenced for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and you did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase a copy for yourself. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Who Should Read This Booklet

Chapter 3: Why Listen To Me

Chapter 4: Remand and Reception

Chapter 5: The Block

Chapter 6: Prison Officers

Chapter 7: Personal Safety

Chapter 8: Relationships

Chapter 9: Transfers

Chapter 10: Mental Health

Chapter 11: Conclusion

INTRODUCTION

Firstly, regardless where you do your time; whichever Australian State, even though prison systems change, the men inside them behave as men everywhere do and have done since prisons were first built - violently and with desperation.

In one survey, prisoners aged 25-34 years accounted for the highest proportion of prisoners for charges relating to acts intended to cause injury (19%); sexual assault (13%); illicit drug offences and unlawful entry with intent (both 11%); homicide, robbery and extortion, and offences against justice (all 10%).

I have written this booklet so that you can save yourself from as many problems as possible in relation to prison violence, and the debilitating fear that can accompany it. New inmates to Australian jails, for whom this booklet has been written, are the most at risk from suffering from both.

Although this booklet has been written for men and discusses male prisons, much of the information may be applicable to prisons generally because it is really about what happens when humans are dehumanised.

WHO SHOULD READ THIS BOOKLET?

This booklet is for anyone in Australia who has any concerns about going to jail. It is for anyone who has just gone to jail and who needs advice about doing their jail time. It is for the parents of anyone going to jail so that they will know a little better how to help their loved ones cope. It is for the partners of anyone going to jail so they too will know how best to support their loved ones while they are away. This booklet is for anyone concerned for anyone facing time in prison.

This is not a booklet that laments the shortfalls of prison - about how prison life should be in an ideal world. It is a booklet that aims to address the reality of doing time in prisons as they actually are. In this booklet I make a number of recommendations which are aimed at achieving one thing and one thing only - your speedy and safe passage through prisons in Australia.

Some people will read this booklet and complain that one or another comment or piece of advice should not have been given because the advice might be seen a politically incorrect. Indeed, if this were an academic tome certain views and opinion might perhaps not have been voiced. However, this booklet is a collection of opinions based on my and other peoples’ experiences in prisons.

This booklet is for ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances – the prospect of serving time in a jail.

WHY LISTEN TO ME?

There are very many articles, booklets, books, and research discussion papers that have been written concerning the topic of imprisonment. However, from a scan of the reviews of many of such writings, there seems to be a common thread of complaint.

The main problem amongst readers is that the texts seem to either be written by researchers with no personal or direct experience of imprisonment, or they have been written by inmates who spend a lot of time recounting their experiences as though they were thug heroes in some battle between evil and eviler. Somewhere in the middle lays the real story.

I have sought to bridge the divide by providing real information from direct experience in a format and style that will be useful for the novice inmate. I have been many things in my life: a businessman, a restaurateur, a ‘bouncer’, a nightclub manager in Bangkok, a maximum security prisoner, a jailhouse lawyer, an academic, a teacher, and a writer. These are the skill and knowledge sets I relied on to get me through my 12 year prison sentence.

A little more about my prison experiences: in 1989 I was initially detained and held by Thai police in relation to currency matters. In 1990 I was arrested by Australian Federal and State police and charged in relation to a conspiracy to commit a crime across international borders. At the time of my arrest I faced two mandatory life terms in prison for the crimes with which I was charged plus ten years for some incidental matters. Facing the prospect of this sort of time during my first year in prison meant that I went through the type of anxiety, stress, and prison risks usually experienced only by lifers and never to be released prisoners.

After a year in prison, a change in the law related to sentencing, and significant behind the scenes legal negotiations, I was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment despite the fact that the Supreme Court questioned the Prosecutor as to why he was not seeking the minimum eighteen years that seemed the appropriate sentence. Indeed I considered myself very lucky to get twelve years, but it had taken some considerable amount of luck and money to get the twelve years I got.

Over the ensuing years I passed through the gates of almost every prison in the State of Queensland including the notoriously violent and archaic Boggo Road and Stewarts Creeks prisons.

I have spent most of my prison life in maximum security prisons with lifers and inmates recommended to never be released, spent time in solitary confinement, found myself in the middle of racially motivated brawls, seen an ex SAS trooper waste away from fear, watched sex traded off for protection, faced my own fears confronting an inmate who I was told was out to get me, became a jailhouse lawyer, and finally, something a little more unusual, became the first prisoner to make a film inside a maximum security block – and this, while still serving a sentence.

I know how prison works and I didn’t learn it from a book written by people who had never experienced prison. I lived the experience, became almost institutionalised and rebuilt a life from what I’d been in prison to something resembling normal, but not quite.

REMAND AND RECEPTION

A reception prison is one that receives new remandees and prisoners, classifies them by giving them a security rating, and either holds (remands) them in custody until either their court matters are finalised (remanded inmates) or until their prison sentence expires. All reception prisons are maximum security installations.

When first arriving at a prison, prisoners will have all their personal belongings taken off them, listed, bagged for stored. They will be given prison clothes, including shoes or runners to wear for the duration of their stay. Prisoners are always strip searched and checked for contraband, particularly drugs. This is induction – an introduction to prison life.

The guards or prison officers here are often very experienced. You can see them greeting inmates who have been in before - even sharing a joke with them or exchanging pleasantries and catching up about who’s in and who’s not. It’s a type of camaraderie at work. Everyone is at work doing what has to be done – prisoners being prisoners, guards being guards – it’s not personal and so there isn’t any real animosity.

There’s usually not a lot of conversation going on at this stage, mostly just getting ready for the game. The inmates who are talking are those who have been here before. Some of them are on a first name basis with the guards. They’re really called prison officers, and it’s not meant derogatorily. A guard just isn’t what they are.

For first timers it’s a good time to just be quiet and watch. Much of the learning in prison comes from just watching. There’s a lot to learn about how to behave right. Make a mistake and you end up learning from experience and the corporal punishment that often swiftly follows. Punishment is dealt out by fellow inmates and it’s usually the same thing – a rebuke, a face up close to yours, a push perhaps, a challenge to do something about it, a smack in the mouth. It’s very humiliating because other inmates are usually looking on getting a measure of your manhood.

Of course you don’t have to be humiliated because you can do the same back to the person as the inmate is doing to you. It depends on how much nerve you’ve got. Anyway, you can give up and back off at any stage but it won’t stop until you’re looking down at the ground like a lame dog that’s been told off, or you’re actually really on the ground.

If this happens to you it’s really bad – for your self-esteem. Nobody will be laughing at you though because most of them will be thinking something along the lines of, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Something like that happened to me once when a big bloke of race started on me and I didn’t stand up to the challenge – I still detest myself not having the nerve to try to kill him and I continue to play that scene out in my mind to this day. Still, he was big, he was black and I did a risk analysis on the situation that told me that copping his insults and provocations was going to be way better for me than trying to maim him. He’d been taking his aggression on white guys for maybe ten years already.

So, one of the first rules to follow as a new inmate is, shut up and look and learn - Monkey See, Monkey Do. See what the experienced inmates are doing and how they are doing it. If you come on all cocky and self-assured like you’re The Man it just won’t end well. Idiots are spotted very quickly by experience inmates and guards and they end up irritating people very quickly.

Mind you, if you’re big enough you can play the fool all day long if you want. Big is good in jail. Real big is even better. I spent a bit of time inside with a bloke called Nathan who was so big that he was able to tear one of the steel doors off its hinges at Boggo Road Jail. He later became a professional wrestler known as The Colossus of Boggo Road and later an actor playing the really huge guy in a number of movies against Brad Pitt in Troy and Jet Li in another martial arts film. He challenged me to leap up and grab him when I visited him in his apartment on the Gold Coast once and just flicked me off – he was as strong as a horse.

Basic medical check-ups are part of induction and conducted before inmates enter the general prison population. They include blood checks for AIDS and Hepatitis C, checks for sexually transmitted diseases carried out by nurses with a prison officer pretending not to see anything while he’s watching on.

This of course is the beginning of the endless series of humiliation exercises that inmates experience throughout their stay in prison. Forced nudity is so popular with the prison officers that on occasion they will even insist visitors subject themselves to such routines – all in the name of security rather than any prurient interest of course.

All prisoners are either accompanied or observed closely by guards at all times and particularly whenever there is movement from one place to another. There are many keyed doors and gates between the various areas of the prison.

Sometimes you are permitted or instructed to move through areas of the prison from one gate to another unaccompanied. The password to have a locked gate opened for you by a prison officer is generally, “Gate Up Boss!” Yet another humiliation that the reference to a guard would be the same as the term the Negros in America used in times well past to refer to their white masters. Get used to it, and there’s more to come because prison life is full of it, and as some say, that’s how it should be. Whether or not that’s true though is, I would say, in 2012, arguable.

Security and inmate observation is ultra-high during the early stages of a prisoner’s stay because of the likelihood that a prisoner will be overcome by his circumstances due to the high levels of stress that they will experience.

I remember my first Christmas night in prison. It was late – close to midnight, and I just laying on my bunk trying to play tricks with time that would make the years until I would be back to my life the way it had been seem less than they were seeming.

“Not this Xmas, not the next one, not the next one, and not the next, and not the next one” and it was already and it was already not working when I heard a door and some voices and then a dragging sound.

I got up on my desk below the high window overlooking the next yard and in light below I could see several prison officers gathered around a lump on the ground, one of them pumping away, the others kneeling watching. When I looked behind them a bit I saw a cell lit up, the door wide open and a bit of white fabric hanging down from somewhere higher in the cell that I couldn’t see.