Killing Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

then nine to stop him!
    Another bloke called Mick (not Mick Hall) was in for a murder committed over a drug deal gone wrong when the delivery driver had been chained to a tree and shot more than once. There were a number of accused and Mick had dropped all of them in the shit along with himself. As the trial approached you could see the pressure mount. Where was the hard bastard who strutted about the unit telling everyone he was a bikie? One night just before the trial there was one hell of a to-do in the unit very late. All I could hear was someone saying “stay with me Mick” over and over. It turns out the brave man had slashed his arms from elbow to wrist and had nearly bled out when he called for help. As it turns out it was lucky he did set off the emergency alarm and it worked (surprisingly), because all were acquitted at the conclusion of the trial! You can always tell when someone is fair dinkum about suicide because they don’t cut across their wrists, they cut down. It is harder to stop the bleeding and to repair the veins.
    There was also another category of crook in Sirius East at the time: those who didn’t need protection from the rest of the prison; rather, the rest of the prison system needed protection from them. They were blokes who had such short fuses that they were likely to go off and belt anybody at any time. I had the privilege of sharing the space with a couple of such blokes. One was a particularly violent bloke called Austin Kildea. Austin was, to be polite, not playing with a full deck and used to let his fists do the talking rather than try to intellectualise his way out of anything. As a result, poor old Aussie was kept in protection for many years, and if the medication was late or didn’t arrive, as was so often the case, he would go off, more often than not belting into a screw.
    One day, when I was in another part of the jail, I saw Aussie being dragged off to the slot (solitary confinement) after belting yet another screw. Six officers were carrying him horizontal to the footpath, face-down. His hands were cuffed behind him and his legs were cuffed together. As the officers walked along, the ones in front dropped his face onto the ground and the others behind just kept pushing. You can imagine what that did to Austin’s face. Not good. Of course, prisoners who had a tendency to belt the screws were given a very wide berth, and the screws only went near them when absolutely necessary, for obvious reasons.
    There were a couple of other prisoners in this category, one of whom I used to play footy with. When, to quote him, he “chinned” one of the supervisors one evening, I was singled out for special treatment on the basis that I knew him. That’s the sort of logic that applies in jail.
    There were other blokes in the unit of a similar ilk, whose names I can’t remember. To give you an idea of the terrific blokes we had in there, there was a very old man who was in for raping his adult son. There was another bloke who was in for raping his daughter and he was so competent that he had shot himself in the head nine times with a nail gun, yes nine times, and hadn’t killed himself! How on earth can you do that to yourself and not take your own life? You can imagine what sort of a state this bloke was in. He was not travelling at all well and wouldn’t have anything to do with anybody else. He was a cave dweller – in other words, he came out of his cell for food or medication; the rest of the time he sat in his darkened cell with the curtains drawn.
    There was just one other category of inmate: those prisoners who were suffering obvious mental conditions and should patently not be in jail. A classic example was a bloke called Joe Smith. I’m telling you about Joe out of pity for Joe and my complete disgust with the system. I liked Joe and felt sorry for him. He had an unfortunate family background and was a chronic schizophrenic. All he did