Australia's Most Murderous Prison

BEHIND THE WALLS OF GOULBURN JAIL"Keep it up and ill tip you to Goulburn they would threaten,'' said a former inmate. "This place was for all the fuckups. It was a death sentence.''Snap!The broom bent before busting, splinters slapping the wall as the wood broke over his knee. Snap!Another broom broke, this one over a different knee.Snap! Snap! Snap!More brooms breaking, some lent against walls and stomped in the middle, others simply smashed into the floor. They were no longer brooms. They were weapons: splintered, sharp and in the hands of the five Aboriginal inmates about to cause the bloody riot that would put prison officer Richard Swain in a coma.Another officer was beaten unconscious with an inmate using a didgeridoo as a pile driver.But when it comes to Goulburn Jail this is nothing. Not for the 130-year-old prison that is the most murderous jail in Australia. The jail that is called "The Killing Fields''.AN unprecedented spate of murders in the 1990's - seven in just three years - made Goulburn jail the most feared prison in Australia. Inmates who were sent to the towering sandstone menace, located an hour and half south west of Sydney, declared they had been given the death sentence. Every man who entered the prison was marked for death, and not because of his crime. In the Killing Fields you were murdered because of the colour of your skin. The worst race war in the history of Australian prisons saw four groups; the Aboriginals, the Lebanese, the Asians, and rest, wage a vicious and uncontrollable war as they battled for control of the prison drug trade.Every day there were stabbings. Every day there were bashings. And when they weren't being bashed or stabbed, they were being murdered.The vicious riot, the one that saw guards belted with didgeridoos and stabbed with broken broomsticks, put an end to the segregation that saw Goulburn jail the only prison in the world to separate men by race. It also ended the Killing Field. But soon something far scarier would rise, something called SuperMax.Called a variety of things from "Australia's most secure prison'' to a "hell hole'', SuperMax is the only prison has seen complaints referred to the United Nations. All white walls and solitary confinement, it is where Australia's most evil men are locked away. It is home to Ivan Milat, to the Cobby Killers, to Bilal Skaf, and to Bassam Hamzy to name a few. And soon you will meet them all; murderers, rapists, terrorists. This is Australia's Most Murderous Prison, the Killing Fields, Inside the Walls of Goulburn Jail.