Comment on A Former Officer’s Experiences at H.M. Prison, Pentridge. by FORMER H.M.PENTRIDGE PRISON OFFICER: STEVE DENNIS. SERVED 1989.

Good on ya Bill, Pentridge & French Island must of worked for you, and put you on the straight and narrow, good to see you never went back. A bit like the 1974 Skyhooks, Horror Movie song.Unfortunately the old conditions of stir, will have hardened you and left a lot of indelible scars and marks on your mind. And also a few lost years of your life. Prison life also has the same effect on many of the Screws, myself included. We have become some what paranoid, for ever watchfully in our surroundings, and see things as very black and white, always watching over our shoulders, brutalised and hardened and still see our past flashback on ourselves as though we are still warders, in the free world even when off duty, or for long years after leaving our service as screws. The s&*( that went on in jail, stays with you, burnt into your mind. Even though we could go home from the jail at the end of our shift. We remain F*&^ing Dogs, as we were always being called, and it stays In our minds, we were also behind bars and also locked up in our minds, seeing the hard brutality and verbal abuse and institutionalised anger of the tough regime of , day to day, tit for tat in the high security jails.
As the boredom in much of Pentridge was like doing time in the 1980,s and 1990,s . Not as bad as your time Bill in the 1960s & 1970s, but now controlled by the dirty gained money and greed that drugs, power and corruption have bittered and twisted the underworld. Drugs have changed the old criminal world for the worst. Drugs have ruined the outside world and have ruined the inside even more. The hatred of man towards man, the them and us culture, us watching them- and them watching back at us with dislike, and hatred. The criminal gang culture, the standover of stronger prisoners over weaker prisoners, the prison rapes, The day to day prison violence, the bashings, the stabbings, the paybacks over who runs the drug trafficking inside and the damage done by prisoners addicted to these drugs and just the day to day boredom, watching the prisoner smacking up in the cells, or pacing the yards, in between their next score of smack. The deadly Hep 3, and HIV diseases formed in jail from the drugs, and just the endless stresses caused by the incarceration and the constant tension brewing between prisoner factions and groups.
They say you can remove the crim or the screw from the jail, but you can never remove the jail from the crim of the screw !………………………………………………