Dancing with Demons Read online

  Fortunately for me, I was well supported by the head of the Prison Psychology Service, Irene Mamontoff. Irene was remarkable – a talented and unusually capable administrator who had managed to expand her position as the only psychologist within the Department of Corrective Services into an empire of more than twenty practitioners in the space of several years. No trivial feat for a woman in a male-dominated and inherently misogynist environment. She was also fluent in seven languages, which was of great assistance in dealing with a diverse and multicultural prison population.

  I also benefited from the work of Terry Dorey, the senior psychologist at Parramatta, who had already managed to establish some credibility for our profession through his reputation for not countenancing bullshit and playing with a straight bat to screws and crims alike.

  I had first met Terry at my job interview and had liked his approach and style. I knew I could work with him and hopefully learn a lot from his experience. Because of my early arrival, however, Terry was still a good hour away. So, to kill time and to familiarise myself with the terrain, I decided to negotiate my way across the prison yards to the administration block, where my new office was situated.

  I ended up at the rear entrance, a door that was used by the prisoners.

  ‘Yeah, what do you want?’ boomed the prison officer who was manning the post.

  ‘Prison psychologist. Could you let us in, mate?’ I responded with a haughty air.

  ‘Do you know what time it is, you stupid cunt?’

  Gobsmacked, I had no time to reply before he continued.

  ‘It’s fuck’n eight o’clock, shithead. The psycho won’t be here for at least another hour, so why don’t you crawl back under the rock you came from and fuck’n don’t waste my time.’

  And then the penny dropped. The green T-shirt that I was wearing matched the colour of the crims’ prison garb. My desire for acceptance had unwittingly cast me in the role of a crim for the day.

  ‘No, I’m the new prison psychologist! Please let me in,’ I stammered.

  ‘Fuck! Fuck’n sorry, mate!’ was the urgent and highly embarrassed reply.

  ‘No worries, pal. You can never be too careful,’ I joked, trying to humour him before things turned ugly. This was how I learnt my first valuable lesson of prison survival: always be diplomatic and assume nothing, as things are rarely what they seem.

  Within my first week, I quickly learned another lesson: gossip is the elixir of life for the terminally bored. The prison grapevine was more powerful than a locomotive and faster than a speeding bullet. Whisper campaigns could make or break a prisoner, with deadly consequences for those who fell on the wrong side of an adverse inference. The truth of this was forcefully driven home to me when I was called in to counsel a quietly spoken man who had been sentenced to a term of imprisonment for a series of burglaries. No one else was present at the time of the offences so no one had been hurt. Unfortunately for him, a psychopathic prison officer had taken a strong dislike to him and, in an act of bastardry, had ‘leaked’ to other prisoners that the prisoner was, in fact, a child molester. The man had been bashed and raped to within an inch of his life.

  Child molesters were known as ‘rock spiders’, the lowest of the low. At the other end of the spectrum, safe crackers or ‘tank men’ held the top position. These blokes were well regarded not only because of the generally large sums of money they had been able to take, but also because of the considerable skill, precision and daring which their feats demanded.

  Between the two poles lay an ascending rite of passage to recognition and associated claims to various perks and entitlements from other crooks.

  I knew that I would need to be ever vigilant to the grapevine, both in relation to how it might implicate me in some way and in relation to the situation of the prisoners who were to become my ‘clients’.

  I made a determined effort from day one to be equally available for the prison officers so they would include me as a member of their management team. After all, because of their close association and contact with the crims, they were in a strong position to observe and report upon any changes in my clients’ demeanour, which might signal trouble.

  So, as well as discussing the power and grace of the officers’ shiny new Valiant Chargers and Holden Monaros (‘Beautiful chromework, mate’), I would spend my spare time playing touch football with them. When summer approached, I swapped the football for a cricket bat.

  As the months progressed, I noticed the prison officers on the gate were more accepting of me, which in turn gave me easier access into the prison grounds.

  On a typical day, my first port of call was to Harry Duff’s office, where I would share a cup of coffee and some warm scones which had been brought to him from the jail bakehouse. (Sadly, the bakehouse was closed not long after I started following an episode involving a robbery of the yeast, which was used to make the notorious ‘home brews’ by prisoners in their cells.) Other senior prison personnel would join us, including the Deputy Governor Wal Thompson and the male nurse Chris Miles, whose support and guidance was invaluable to me during those early months.

  As well as spending time with the officers, I made an effort to connect to the prisoners – attending their sporting functions on the weekends and, when the opportunity presented itself, teaching some of them the latest rock guitar riffs. All of the hours I had spent in my youth studying classical guitar and playing in a teenage rock band were finally bearing some real fruit, if only through teaching crims how to play The Monkees’ ‘I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone’.

  Many prisoners avoided making contact with the civilian staff, frightened of the stigma that may become attached to them if they were known to be seeing the prison shrink. So, despite my best attempts, very few of the prisoners came to see me in those first few weeks.

  My office was located in the basement area of the administration block and lodged little more than the bare essentials. These included a government issue desk, telephone, filing cabinet and three chairs. It was not unlike a prison cell, with all of the atmosphere and charisma of the local morgue. ‘No wonder these blokes don’t want to come for a visit,’ I thought.

  Strolling around the prison yards helped alleviate my claustrophobia as well as allowing me to connect with the prisoners. At a subconscious level, I was also letting them know that I had no fear of them and that I was just a regular guy. Although my desire to do this was initially met with alarm by the prison authorities, they eventually understood that I needed to be visible.

  As my confidence grew, I would wander further afield, spending hours walking the floors of the Parramatta Linen Service, a huge industrial laundry complex situated next to the residential part of the jail. Aside from some administrative staff and custodial officers, the PLS was entirely manned by prisoners. In exchange for their labour, prisoners could earn extra privileges such as extended weekend visits and a small wage.

  By leaving my office and going to see the prisoners on their turf, I won their respect and their trust. I suspected that the officers also came to begrudgingly respect my bona fides and, more importantly, to realise that a psychologist could make their tasks much easier by defusing tensions within the jail. As time progressed, a trickle of prisoners started to visit my office.

  Apart from dealing with the ever-present relationship problems on the outside, the prisoners’ problems ranged from troubles adjusting to prison life through to serious thoughts of suicide after years of being deprived of their liberty. Parramatta housed more long-term recidivist prisoners than any other jail. The average duration of a sentence there was in the vicinity of fifteen years. For most of the population the dream of being shifted to a less secure jail was years away. Depression and anxiety were the constant companions of many of my clients.

  Many also presented with longstanding substance abuse problems. With the older men, this generally related to a protracted history of alcohol abuse, which in turn had negatively impacted upon their judgement over the years a
nd led to a revolving door of crime, jail, release and rearrest. The younger crooks followed a similar pattern, although their agents of destruction were more typically narcotics and amphetamines. The younger blokes were also more often than not serving time for serious drug-related crimes such as armed robbery and murder that they’d committed at a very young age.

  As well as seeing prisoners, I spent time on various prison committees. One such committee involved the classification of prisoners into different institutions according to their security rating. ‘Classo’, as it was referred to by staff and prisoners alike, was seen as a futile exercise. Most of the crims were not eligible to have their security ratings lowered for at least seven to ten years. And yet, every Tuesday morning, we would congregate, marching the prisoners in one at a time only for them to be told that they could not expect a shift for years to come.

  These meetings did, however, allow me to make contact with some of the more avoidant crims. Like arsonist Jeffrey Thomas Hardy. A tragic misfit with an intellectual disability, Jeffrey personified what happened when governments failed to provide suitable facilities for people who had broken the law primarily because of their intellectual incapacity to fully understand it. Jeffrey was a lamb to the slaughter in the prison’s unforgiving environment and I made it my mission to help him as best I could. We often shared an early morning cup of tea and a smoke, while he spoke about his problems.

  Other more renowned prisoners eventually found their way to my office. These included the infamous Billy Munday, who received fifty-eight years for his crimes, which included not only armed robbery, escape from lawful custody and rape while on the run, but also telling the learned judge to ‘get fucked’ at the time of sentencing.

  Billy commanded immense respect within the prison. A psychopath to the core, he was renowned for taking no prisoners. He was a powerfully built man with a high degree of athleticism, who was physically imposing and tough. Being classically ‘old school’, he kept his distance from all those in authority, trusting no one. Fortunately by the time we met I had established a positive reputation among the inmates as a person who could in fact be trusted. He consulted with me on one occasion only to discuss a sensitive jail-house political issue.

  Other heavies such as the late ‘Jockey’ Smith preferred to keep their own counsel. Jockey was a notorious underworld figure in the 1970s who began as a small-time crook in his teenage years and undertook his apprenticeship with Ronald Ryan, who was infamously recorded as the last person to be executed in Australia. By the time he came to Parramatta Gaol, Jockey had been convicted of the murder of Lloyd Tidmarsh, a high-profile Sydney bookmaker. Much of the prison population derived a sense of prestige in having such a notorious crook on their turf.

  The mood of the prison could change within a matter of minutes. Some days I would arrive at work to be confronted by an electric tension in the air. This generally happened at times when bad deeds were afoot, involving a planned bashing of an inmate, or worse, murder. On other days, the ambience was far more relaxed. As time progressed, I came to appreciate the significance of these mood shifts – they were a kind of institutional barometer by which the psychological health and safety of the jail could be assessed. I also came to appreciate, trust and rely upon my intuition and gut instinct more than I ever had in the past.

  Some of the heaviest crims in the prison were regular visitors to my office. These blokes were known in jail vernacular as ‘gangsters’. All-powerful within the prison muster, they had the ear of the superintendent whenever it was needed. In exchange for the positive influence they could exert in keeping the mood of the jail reasonably stable, they were afforded a range of privileges. These included access to the more comfortable cells in the wings where the wall between two adjoining cells had been removed to create, by jail standards, a den of palatial proportions. They also enjoyed being allowed to remain out of their cells for several hours after the bulk of the population had been locked up for the night. This was a huge indulgence as cell confinement started at 3 p.m. and prisoners spent no less than eighteen hours per day locked in their cells.

  The prison gangsters taught me a lot about how the place was run. The jail had official rules, which every new prisoner received upon his arrival, but there was also an unwritten code among the inmates. At the top of the code was the immutable decree that a prisoner never informed on another. To transgress this law could lead to death or at least a life-threatening assault. Prison informers were disparagingly referred to as ‘dogs’. Once discovered, the only option for a dog was to place himself on protection, where he would join the ranks of other so-called lowlifes such as the rock spiders.

  Protection prisoners ‘did it hard’, particularly at Parramatta. Typically, these hapless souls would spend much of their time in the ‘Circle’. Aptly named because of its shape, the Circle was divided, not unlike half an orange, into symmetrical segments. Each segment formed the basis of a cell, which could be observed from above by the prison officers who patrolled two perpendicular catwalks across the diameter of the structure. There was no shade and no privacy. And there the prisoners would sit, perched on a concrete slab adjacent to a tin dunny and a basin, on their own for six hours a day, before being herded back into their cells for the long night ahead.

  Contrary to my expectation that the downtrodden would band together to secure some strength in numbers, they too established a hierarchy of oppression, frequently standing over the weakest in their midst for sexual favours and the like.

  The gangsters also taught me some of the prison jargon, which was used as a type of secret dialect when communicating. This was invaluable for me in developing affinity and credibility with the prisoners and in enabling me to understand what the hell they were talking about. Initially, a typical revelation such as ‘The bloke got a hamburger. He’s going to fly the flag because the beak’s a fuck’n dog and it’s only worth a fuck’n brick’ was entirely meaningless to me. Once I knew the jargon though, I understood the prisoner was telling me his mate had recently received a life sentence for murder. He was planning an appeal because the judge (the ‘beak’) had erred in his direction to the jury and the finding should have been manslaughter, which carried a sentence of ten years.

  During these early days, my enthusiasm was unbridled. I was comfortably ensconced in a sharehouse in the trendy suburb of Balmain. I was five minutes between two pubs and a ten-minute walk to the ferry, which, in fifteen minutes, would commute me under the Harbour Bridge to the city.

  I would regularly get up early so I could arrive at the jail before the prisoners were let out of their cells. I had developed an unquenchable thirst for knowledge about the prison and the prisoners.

  I loved the work and the invaluable insights and experience I was gaining working in Australia’s most notorious and arguably toughest maximum security prison.

  BLIND MAN’S BLUFF

  After a few months of working at Parramatta Gaol, I felt like I was handling life well – balancing my social life in Balmain with the intense world of the prison every day. But I soon discovered I was ill-equipped to deal with the arrival of one of the state’s most celebrated prisoners.

  Although prison jobs paid a pittance, many of the inmates, desperate to alleviate their boredom, would vie for work. Jobs also generally came with perks that no amount of cash could buy. These included access to additional phone calls, and the conversion of a booth visit – where the prisoner was separated from his loved one by glass – to a more intimate contact visit, and so on, if a guard was prepared to turn a blind eye. The unwritten rule was that these favours were done in exchange for a return favour when the need arose. Return favours included the prisoner acting as a pacifier if there was trouble brewing in a wing, or being an enforcer of jail discipline when a screw could not be seen to be involved.

  One of the most coveted jobs in the prison was working as a clerk in the administration block. Apart from the office of the superintendent, this was the most powerful building
in the jail; a place where most of the decisions regarding a prisoner’s fate were made. It was home to the professional staff, including two psychologists, an education officer and two welfare workers. Probation and parole officers also visited the office on a regular basis. The place was far more ‘prisoner friendly’ than, say, the cookhouse, the laundry or the yards, where on the wrong day you could be bashed and fucked at a moment’s notice. Such was the competition to work in the admin block that prisoners were prepared to wait years for a rare vacancy, which usually only occurred when a prisoner either died or achieved a better release through parole. Parramatta was no last train to Munich. For most, it was the end of the line.

  So I was quite surprised when I arrived one day and noticed a new prisoner occupying the office of Kevin Finnerty, the education officer. Dressed in immaculately starched prison greens, the man gazed at me with strange eyes, reminiscent of over-poached eggs.

  ‘Cup of tea, mate?’ he gently enquired.

  ‘You’d like me to make you a cup, would you?’ I joked.

  Sensing the twinkle in my eye he said, ‘Yeah. And then I’d like you to come next door, lie on my couch and tell me what it is in your past that’s made you such a shameless cunt today.’

  I burst out laughing. Whoever he was, he had balls the size of Texas and a sense of humour to match.

  ‘Tim Watson-Munro,’ I said as I held out my hand.

  ‘Carl Synnerdahl,’ came the equally warm response.

  ‘I like your style, Carl,’ I chuckled.

  ‘And I like your clothes, mate. I know who you are, you’re the jail meter reader.’

  Then it dawned on me. This was the legendary Carl Synnerdahl, the man who had single-handedly duped the prison authorities, the court and some of the country’s top ophthalmologists into believing that he had become blind. And all the while, his vision was 20/20. No wonder that, within two hours of arriving at the prison, he had rorted himself into the jail’s most coveted position.