Mayhem

by Matthew Thompson

  The next morning I go to the leader of the Lebs – right to his cell door. He didn’t even come out when I was there yesterday. Just left it up to his group. The bloke’s eyeballing me through his peep hole. ‘So much for Hezbollah,’ I say. ‘Hiding from me. Were ya? Was that really the best your yard can do? I didn’t even need a bandaid.’

  He goes ballistic. But stays behind his door.

  *

  Not willing to join the White Power group, I become more or less on my own in the Aussie–Asian yard.

  I’m fairly tight with the Asian leadership and we do a lot of sparring, mainly when I’m bored and jump up on tables when they’re playing cards. The screws are at first alarmed by this, especially when up to eight of them use me as a kick bag. ‘Is that it?’ I say, laughing at them and trying to increase their passion, the nasty little fucks. I’m having fun, even if I’m bruised and sore for days afterwards. I don’t want to get stabbed or any shit like that, but the pain of a good barehanded fight means nothing to me. What little I feel of it feels good.

  The Aussies in the yard don’t like it at all. They’re confused and feel powerless. I tell them to stay out of it as I throw the Asians around like rag dolls and cop a good pounding in return.

  *

  Sometimes it’s hard to feel at all.

  One occasion in the yard I black out after hitting my head on concrete guttering, opening up a slice that needs ten stitches. The doctor isn’t a bad bloke and he’s asking if I want pain relief, but I just cut him dead: ‘Stitch me up and stop talking,’ I say. There’s no pain anyway, nor emotions.

  *

  I run solo and everybody knows this. So a lot of the time I’m at odds with the White Power group that run the Aussie side of things here.

  When there’s a real problem brewing between the yards, however, they want to hear my views and often let me make the call.

  *

  There is an edict in the yard that I enforce passionately and brutally: sex offenders are not welcome.

  When a sex offender is escorted into the yard, I give them two choices: leave voluntarily or be stretchered out never to return.

  None of these vile animals are exempt, not even if they are well connected in the yard. I don’t care who they know: no pass is given, and some hard fucks bleed.

  Sometimes there are assassination attempts made against me in the yard, but vigilance-vigilance-vigilance saves me: life in the combat zone.

  *

  Towards the end of my time at Goulburn I change into the Aussie–Islander yards, but the two groupings associate on the same oval together anyway for shared oval times, three times a week, and then we’re in yards adjacent to each other. Plus we’re living on the same landings. There isn’t much difference.

  LATE 2003

  In 2003 I’m accepted to be paroled in Victoria.

  But then the Purana Task Force supposedly receives intelligence that my life is in danger. I’m an associate of the Moran family, they say, causing Carl Williams to worry that I might target him; causing them to worry that Carl has decided on a pre-emptive strike on me. I’d love to hear more about all this and try to stop my parole being rejected but Purana make their presentations in secret and I have no fucking clue what’s going on.

  The duty parole solicitor tells me that in twenty years he’s never seen such conduct. I can’t get parole in either Victoria or NSW.

  Am I pissed off? You fucking bet, and I refuse to comply with prison routine.

  *

  Everything is revolting me so much I go to segregation for a self-imposed exile from the yards.

  Studying Buddhism, I swipe a red Christmas tablecloth and bleach it heavily until it is orange. My prison greens get shredded and now I wear the orange cloth, focusing on peace and tranquillity.

  The staff try to seize my orange robe; they don’t like it and they don’t want to tolerate it. But their attempts to strip me of my Buddhist clothing inflame the situation beyond where they want to take it. The staff are worried that my spiritual insubordination will spread to the rest of the jail.

  It is agreed that I can have the orange sheet, on the condition I only wear it in my cell. If I go out it must be in normal prison garb.

  This is how they reluctantly come to return my robe and leave me in isolation to protest peacefully and practise the teachings of Buddha.

  *

  The Buddhist retreat ends when a friend needs help in the yards.

  The staff let me know that Gavin Preston – the bloke who got nabbed at the protest with Mum and Barry – is in custody over some foolish caper and that he is having major issues in the mainstream population.

  How he winds up in NSW custody starts with his house getting shot up by Victor Brincat – one of Carl Williams’ big triggermen – during the Melbourne gangland wars.

  Gavin shit himself and fled the state in his car but he ran out of petrol and he ran out of money.

  He was doing a petrol drive-off near Port Macquarie. The service station owner realised that he didn’t pay, called his sons on the phone and what’s happened is they done a scout of the area, spotted the car, followed him down a back road; he got bogged – it was muddy, okay. So he’s jumped out of the car, produced a sawn-off shotgun, told them to fuck off.

  They said, ‘Listen mate, you didn’t pay for your petrol. Maybe you forgot – we’re giving you the chance before we call the police.’

  He didn’t have any money on him, but he tried to offer them four pills – eggies – and two grams of pot.

  ‘Nah, we don’t want the drugs, we want the money. If you can’t pay the money we’re calling the police.’ They called the police. The police arrived and he’s run to hide the gun. They just followed the footsteps in the mud, recovered the gun and got him.

  Anyway, he winds up here eventually and the yard is refusing to accept him because of past acts that I won’t go into.

  But I am in debt to Gavin. He supported me and the other H Division hunger strikers even when he had a warrant out on him and we cost him his liberty. That’s solid.

  So I abandon my teachings and go down to confront the entire yard. It works, there’s no blood spilt, and Gavin now has a place.

  But Gavin and me?

  Maybe we used to have something in common: our roots, our stomping grounds as kids, and I know Barry gets on okay with him and is good mates with his brother. And like I said about Gavin supporting the HSU-5 even at the cost of his liberty.

  But something’s shifted, you know, something’s rubbing the wrong way, and don’t forget everything I’ve said about how prison is a fucking rage factory where just breathing is to infuse hostility, and when it happens that Gavin’s in that bloody yard fighting tooth and nail with somebody, that somebody is me.

  We’re both sent to isolation and face internal disciplinary charges over the stoush. And we’re both later returned to the same yard, annoying the fuck out of each other.

  *

  I’m now 35 years old. It’s about 22 years since I first entered custody. I’ve had some time out but mostly it’s been in, and years of that have been spent twiddling my thumbs in a shitty little cell by myself. It’s about eight years since arriving here via that crazy flight and power convoy, that crazy gunned up, maximum enemy-of-the-state danger-man extradition that had me feeling like Pablo Escobar. Who needs a fucking private narco-army, though. Here, if you can get your hands on a hacksaw blade it’s enough to shake civilisation as we know it.

  But anyway, I think after all this I’m qualified to say that Goulburn jail is a fucking awful old place. What’s starting to really get at me is noticing an alarming rate of inmates being released and then returning, some within days, sadly.

  And no wonder when there’s little or no work opportunity and a lack of education time allocated to each yard. The inmates and education staff are both frustrated – you can tell – because it’s so hard to make any progress.

  On top of that, there’s no real pre-release program to he
lp prepare inmates for walking out into a fucking very complicated world that lives by a totally different set of rules, and a whole lot more complex rules than this jungle of fuckheads.

  If they go out there and continue living the way that gets entrenched in here – for survival’s sake – then they are fucked; people are going to get hurt and they are guaranteed to get locked up again.

  Inmates getting out need post-release support. They need help to stabilise with housing once they’re free from jail. You’d be amazed how many people walk out with nowhere to go, except maybe back to ask a favour of the kind of people that are still getting hectic.

  We need some help getting productive and we need some help to transition.

  It’s playing on my mind so I decide to conduct some unauthorised research into inmates reoffending. Many of the education and prison staff support what I’m doing and they help, enabling me to photocopy and distribute the secret-ballot style questionnaire I make. Part of it is about the shitty conditions of the jail: our exposure to the weather and the lack of basic things like the means to hang up wet clothes, but the guts of it in terms of looking at reoffending is the section looking at what inmates actually get and what they want in terms of education and rehabilitation.

  Despite the usual state of war, I manage to get all the different yards and ethnic groups of C Wing onside for this. We’re not all fools, not all the time, anyway.

  Without the staff’s involvement, this exercise would never have got off the ground. Enough of them recognise the damning indictment unfolding for all to see: inmates who may as well have never left, so short was their time before reoffending; the same faces in the yards for years. And each time one of us goes out and reoffends the community is damaged again. Helping to stabilise and educate prisoners, helping them become productive members of the community outside, would be making society safer. Caging them in these rage factories and then dumping them out is not.

  The results from the 130-odd completed questionnaires are overwhelming: we want help. We need and want a prison system that takes in fuckheads and unwinds them, that educates them, that calms and stabilises them, that teaches them how regular society works and prepares them for a place in that. And we want help afterwards so that we’re not lost and confused and screwing up and regressing.

  *

  I’m not afraid to say I’m too often Exhibit A. Just days before my release I get in a blue in the yard and the Emergency Response Group has to gas me to bring me down from rage mountain.

  So don’t get me wrong; yes, part of me can step back and see how fucked up things are and recognise the need for change. But my nerve endings, my adrenal glands, the solja in my soul, have been formed over decades of interlinking brutal contests between me and the police, me and the prisons, me and the inmates, me and the world.

  So when the day comes after thirteen straight years in jail, almost nine in NSW, with years of it solitary and years of it race-hate combat zones – when the day comes that they open the gate, giving me half a dole cheque and a train ticket to Sydney: when that day is now I walk free with Charles Manson eyes and the heart of a pitbull.

  Into a limousine.

  60. INTO ANOTHER WORLD

  2005: SYDNEY’S STREETS

  Looking around at Sydney my head is spinning. I’m walking into a different world. Literally. I’ve spent so long inside that I’ve come out and the currency’s different; when I went in in 1992 the currency was still paper and now it’s all plastic. So much has changed: the cars, the mobile phones, technology, everything.

  When I went into custody in 1992 there was the Motorola bricks. They were fucking like $5000 each – not many people had them. Now every cunt’s got a little Nokia. And what’s this other shit – walking through the city there’s all these people talking to themselves. Or talking to me, are they? What the fuck? But no, it’s Bluetooth. Weird fucking devices, man. My life has lurched into the future. It’s spinning me out.

  Everything’s doing my head in. Especially ’cos I’ve been in isolation so much and I’m used to a little yard like about three metres by fucking four and a half or something like that.

  I wish I’d been settled before release; inmates need to be acclimatised before being released from those environments and conditions. But I haven’t been and inside I just want to run wild. What am I good at now? War. What skills do I have? War. Oh, and I can drop and do 100 push-ups without breaking a sweat. I can do 600 in a few sets.

  But what do I do now? How do I contain the BADNE$$? Take the cell away; take the cages away; take the screws away and now I don’t have those ego boundaries. I’m feeling silly. I’m a spinning top. I’m deranged; I’m electric; I see all the daily hurly burly of normal civilian life around me and I’m like, ‘I don’t give a fuck about this; I don’t give a fuck about that.’

  I’m full of hate. I’m angry. Sure, I enjoy being able to buy food and clothes; of course I like freedom, but after a short period you start to get – well, it’s hard to explain: you just don’t fit in. You’re not settled. You’re not comfortable. You feel awkward. You don’t feel right. You just feel out of place – you really do.

  And it’s so fucked up, you know, because you’d think, ‘Oh great, I’ve put that life behind me. I want to forget about it – they’re bad memories.’

  But it’s not the case. It doesn’t work like that. Especially with me. I’ve done so long, I don’t know any better – my nerves are fused. I don’t know any different. Out here, it’s all foreign. It’s another world.

  61. MEDIA BLITZ

  FEBRUARY 2005: SYDNEY

  CHRIS:

  Staying in Sydney, I do a four-day media blitz to get this message out. With the help of good-hearted, good-headed comrades like Brett Collins, a rehabilitated former inmate who runs Justice Action, I’m doing interviews with newspapers, with TV – the ABC even interviews me for Four Corners – I talk to Peter FitzSimons on air and a legal program on ABC Radio National. I keep explaining what negative time prison is – how it’s even worse than a lost opportunity – and what society needs is for inmates to be educated, settled, prepared and helped. Then everybody’s safer.

  A NSW Greens MP, Lee Rhiannon, holds a press conference with me at which we discuss the unauthorised survey I ran at Goulburn and the great desire it shows that inmates have for real education in prison – not Mickey Mouse courses squeezed in (more like squeezed out) here and there but a sincere and serious program of educating us misfits behind bars. And it shows how bad conditions are in that wretched old place. Pentridge was like that and it’s been shut for years.

  I want to present my survey to the NSW Government but they won’t take it. Not interested. I’m a scumbag.

  What a bunch of stooges. I guess they’re waiting for some mild-mannered choirboy who’s never done anything wrong to come out from years in jail and give them the word on what’s really happening.

  The longer the prison system goes on entrenching its pigheaded us-versus-them mentality in inmates, the more inmates are gonna come out in a brutalised state: a state of anger, a state of trauma, a state that is dangerous to the community.

  Why the fuck wouldn’t you want to take a crim, someone who is at war with society, and do everything you reasonably can to calm them, to get them educated – I didn’t even finish Year 8 – to get them skilled as tradespeople or professionals, to teach them how to be responsible and make it in the regular world, instead of taking all the illegal shortcuts that seem easier at the time.

  But if a crim’s talking, quick: stick your fingers in your ears.

  7 DECEMBER 2004: NSW LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL 13383 GOULBURN CORRECTIONAL CENTRE SURVEY

  Ms LEE RHIANNON [10.22 p.m.]: Christopher Binse, a long-term inmate of the C-Wing of Goulburn maximum-security gaol, has undertaken a survey of his fellow inmates, and it paints a revealing picture of conditions at the gaol. Mr Binse photocopied his survey on slips of paper and circulated them. He got 134 responses to his questions about conditio
ns in the wing and the availability of rehabilitation programs. The survey results show that Goulburn gaol is violating the United Nations standard minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners. Under rule 6.1 there is supposed to be no discrimination, yet inmates are separated into different yards on the basis of their ethnicity. Under rule 10 prisoners are supposed to be protected from weather extremes, but the yard is exposed to the elements. Inmates are also refused permission to return to their cells when the weather is bad. Under rule 17.1 prisoners are supposed to have adequate clothing, but it is not enough to withstand Goulburn’s winter. Under 17.2 that clothing should be kept in proper condition, but there are no facilities for inmates to hang up their wet clothes, jackets and towels. This has caused illness among the inmates. Rules 58, 60.2 and 64 relate to rehabilitation and post-release care, but it is clear from the survey that, although prisoners are very willing to undertake education and rehabilitation programs, and they want to get out of gaol and stay out, they are simply not getting access to adequate programs. I congratulate Mr Binse for undertaking this survey, and I urge the Minister for Justice to seriously consider how to improve conditions and rehabilitation programs at Goulburn gaol and indeed all New South Wales prisons.

  3 MARCH 2005: NSW LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL 14573 PRISON SYSTEM REFORM

  The Hon. AMANDA FAZIO: My question is directed to the Minister for Justice. What is the New South Wales Government’s response to recent calls to reform the prison system?

  The Hon. JOHN HATZISTERGOS: Honourable members will be aware that, following the release of Christopher Binse from prison in February this year, a number of requests were made of me—both publicly and with the support of at least one member of this House—that I accord Mr Binse a visit to my office and, according to one media report, that I employ him as a consultant on rehabilitation, which Mr Binse was severely critical of in the context of the New South Wales prison system. Honourable members will also recall that on 7 December 2004 Ms Lee Rhiannon took the opportunity afforded by the adjournment debate to congratulate Mr Binse on circulating a prohibited questionnaire among fellow inmates and encouraging more to do the same.