In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 8 From “Secondary Punishment” to “Supermax” The Human Costs of High-Security Regimes in Australia David Brown and Bree Carlton It is not clear when the term “supermax” was first coined, but the lockdown at Marion prison in Illinois in 1983 is seen by many commentators as a pivotal moment (King 1999, 163). In the Australian context , we would like to draw a longer timeline, linking the emergence of supermax prisons with practices of “secondary punishment” in the early Australian penal colonies, Governor Bathurst’s “culture of Salutary Terror” (Evans, 2009, 60) inflicted on convicts transported for an offense in Britain and then convicted of another offense in the colony. Secondary punishment was a form of additional punishment for further offenses such as drunkenness, insolence, refusal to work, absconding, violence, and rebellion and often involved being sent to a usually isolated, secondary punishment station where particularly harsh conditions and regimes prevailed. Governor Darling, reflecting on the reopening of the Norfolk Island penal colony by the British government as a place of detention for the worst criminals and prisoners from the New South Wales (NSW) and Tasmanian penal colonies in 1824, declared: “My object was to hold out that Settlement as a place of the extremest punishment, short of Death” (quoted in Hoare 1969, 36). Norval Morris (2002, 197, emphasis added) notes that the convicts sent to Norfolk Island were “doubly convicted convicts–in the eyes of the time, the worst of the worst, fit to live neither in their homeland nor in a convict settlement where free settlers lived; the modern parallel is the supermax prison.” The key Australian sites of secondary punishment were Macquarie Harbour and Sarah Island (1821–1822), and later Port Arthur (1830) in Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania); Norfolk Island (1824); Port Macquarie (1921) in NSW; and Morton Bay (1824) in Queensland. These sites featured extreme 95 physical isolation and practices of considerable brutality and terror, including ankle irons, extensive flogging, poor diet, spread-eagling (attaching prisoners to rings in cell walls so their arms were spread out and their feet did not touch the ground), use of a wooden gag, heavy labor in chains in inclement conditions , and inadequate clothing, and in Port Arthur, elements of the “silent system,” segregation and isolation in solitary and punishment cells without any natural light, modeled on the US penitentiary system (see generally Hughes 1988; Evans 2009). Locating the roots of supermax in longer-term penal colonial histories of secondary punishment enables a reexamination of the Maconochie reform period on Norfolk Island, which “turned the island from hell to a peaceful settlement for four of its otherwise barbarous years [1840–1844]” (Morris 2002, 192; see generally Maconochie 1845). For Morris (2002, 198), the “deep end of the prison system raises similar problems to those Maconochie confronted in 1840.” Speculating on how Maconochie might manage current “dangerous and difficult to handle prisoners,” Morris (2002, 201–202, emphasis added) suggests by imposing “the least afflictive control necessary in the light of the threat, and let[ting] each maximum security prison look after its own troublemakers.” He argues that “there is simply no need for a supermax prison or a supermax section of a prison in any state prison system.” While jumping a century into the mid-1900s, it is this challenge to the very existence of supermax regimes that we wish to keep alive in the following case studies of the contemporary uses, misuses, and transitions in high-security prison regimes in the Australian states of NSW and Victoria, the two most populous states in a federal system in which prisons are a state responsibility. The case studies are of the Goulburn High Risk Management Unit (HRMU) in NSW and Barwon Acacia High-Security Unit in Victoria, the two prisons that in the Australian context are most frequently referred to as “supermax” units, and their respective predecessor high-security units: Grafton and Katingal in NSW and Pentridge H Division and Jika Jika in Victoria. This emphasis on transition enables us to chart the various shifts in the justifications for and disciplinary practices of these regimes, from state control primarily through physical brutality through to experiments with techniques of prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation, to current isolation and incentive-based regimes. This approach highlights resistance that has been mobilized by prisoners, prisoner movement and reform forces generally, against forms of unaccountable power and human rights abuses exercised in these regimes. The last section describes what is new about supermax in Australia...

Share