The Dark Story of Goulburn — The Killing Fields and the Supermax That Replaced Them

The Dark Story of Goulburn — The Killing Fields and the Supermax That Replaced Them #goulburnsupermax #australianhistory #prisonhistory In the 1990s, seven men were murdered inside Goulburn gaol in the space of three years, and prisoners told to pack for a transfer there said openly that they had been handed a death sentence. The state's first answer was to separate inmates by ethnicity. Its second answer was a $20 million concrete building. Both are still there, behind a hand-carved sandstone gate that two heritage registers protect. This is the entire story. In this video, we trace Goulburn from James Barnet's 1884 sandstone gaol and the Victorian separate system, through its decades as a reformatory and a training centre, into the gang war and the drug economy that produced the Killing Fields, through the racial clustering policy that stopped the killing, back to Katingal — the sensory-deprivation prison a royal commission shut down after three years — and forward to the High Risk Management Correctional Centre that opened in September 2001. We cover Ivan Milat's eighteen years in Unit Nine, Bassam Hamzy running a network on a smuggled phone that made 19,000 calls in six weeks, the 2015 hunger strike over a thirteen-dollar allowance, and what the state's own inspector found when it walked through the 1884 wing. Every other prison on this channel eventually closed. This one is full right now. 🔍 TOPICS COVERED Goulburn Correctional Centre, High Risk Management Correctional Centre, Goulburn Supermax, New South Wales, James Barnet, Frederick Lemm, Goulburn Reformatory, Goulburn Training Centre, the Killing Fields, racial clustering, Katingal, Nagle Royal Commission, Long Bay, Ivan Milat, Belanglo State Forest, Bassam Hamzy, Brothers for Life, Lithgow Correctional Centre, Operation Pendennis, Corrective Services NSW, Inspector of Custodial Services, Mandela Rules, Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody 📜 SOURCES This video draws on the New South Wales State Heritage Register listing for the Goulburn Correctional Centre complex, Corrective Services NSW institutional records and published material on the High Risk Management Correctional Centre, the Inspector of Custodial Services inspection of Goulburn Correctional Centre and the HRMCC tabled in the NSW Parliament in June 2022, the Inspector's 2018 report on the management of radicalised inmates, the 1978 Nagle royal commission into New South Wales prisons, the 1991 final report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, NSW Ombudsman findings on cell confinement, contemporaneous reporting from the ABC, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian, and James Phelps's book on Goulburn gaol. 🏛️ ABOUT THIS CHANNEL We explore the forgotten institutions of Australia. The gaols. The asylums. The places this country locked people away and then stopped talking about. If you want to understand the architecture of confinement and the people it consumed, subscribe and turn on notifications. #goulburnsupermax #australianhistory #prisonhistory #darkhistory #documentary #forgotteninstitutions #newsouthwales #goulburn #ivanmilat #supermax #katingal #truecrime #institutionalhistory #australiancrime #solitaryconfinement #forgottengaols