High-security Prison To House The Very Worst
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday June 2, 2001
When Ivan Milat enters Goulburn's ``supermax" in August, he will eat cornflakes for breakfast and sleep on a foam mattress on top of a cement base straight out of a Fred Flintstone cartoon.
Each two-metre by three-metre cell has a bed, shelf, toilet, shower and basin, and an attached steel cage where prisoners can breathe fresh air.
Even walking on grass in the tiny exercise yard and using the two half-sized basketball courts will be a privilege that has to be earned.
The $22 million high-risk management unit built within the maximum-security Goulburn jail and opened yesterday by the Premier is no five-star resort for serial killers, as claimed by the Opposition.
But three of the first six prisoners to be held in Australia's most secure jail have murdered a total of 18 people.
``Anyone who's silly enough to say this is five-star accommodation we'll book in for a week but only when the interesting guests are here as well," Mr Carr said yesterday.
Those ``interesting guests" will be Milat, who killed seven backpackers; Lindsey Robert Rose, who murdered five people; Malcolm George Baker, who killed six times; Emad Sleiman, who stabbed to death waterskiing champion Jason Burton; murderer Guy Gibson Staines; and a man on remand charged with murder. They will be isolated in single cells attached to a small common room and will not mix.
They are the worst of the worst, not only for their crimes or alleged crimes, but for their disruptive or violent behaviour within jails. Milat, Rose and Staines are escape risks; the others have bashed prisoners or officers.
The man charged with murder is alleged to have taken a female prison officer hostage at the Metropolitan Remand and Reception Centre in April.
Sparse but humane, the 75-bed jail is ``as close as you are going to get to an escape-proof jail", according to Corrective Services senior assistant commissioner Mr Ron Woodham.
There are two fences, high-powered rifles trained onthe exercise yard, a crack response team, and a camera rotating from 12 metres up in the sky.
The jail's philosophy is to modify prisoners' behaviour through a carrot-and-stick approach to privileges to eventually return them to mainstream jails.
But Mr Woodham acknowledged that some prisoners would die in the supermax, as it has been dubbed, and Milat is expected to spend the next decade there. Another 20 prisoners will be admitted in the next six months.
``Ivan has already said he's got no worries about coming in here," Mr Woodham said.
The prisoners will start out with no privileges, except for perhaps a radio, one visit a month and a weekly phone call. If they participate in pyschological programs like anger management they may get a television, a microwave, more visits and phone calls.
Mr Woodham said the supermax was planned four years ago after a string of violent attacks in prisons.
``They were not impulsive hotheads but cold planners of violence, some of whom have no respect for law enforcement ... and in some cases no respect for human life," he said.
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald
