From "secondary punishment" to "supermax": the human costs of high-security regimes in Australia

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.".