Review of Intractable: Hell Has a Name, Life Inside Australia's First Super-Max Prison.

• Date: 22 December 2006
• Author: Carlton, Bree
• Published date: 22 December 2006
• Author: Carlton, Bree

Bernie Matthews, Intractable: Hell Has a Name, Life Inside Australia's First Super-Max Prison. Sydney: Macmillan Paperback, 2006; ISBN: 1405037482, pp. 408 (including glossary and notes).

AT A CONFERENCE IN SYDNEY JUST UNDER SIX YEARS AGO, I HAD THE RARE opportunity to interview author and journalist Bernie Matthews about his experience in the New South Wales (NSW) Grafton Intractables Unit and Australia's first super-maximum security prison, the Katingal Special Security Unit. Granted compassionate parole due to the impending death of his father, Matthews had been released from prison a week earlier and was eager to share his experiences. The violence and trauma of his experience seethed from the pores of his skin, as did the profound anger and injustice. As a budding researcher at the time, this had a profound emotional impact on me. Few people in the community have the opportunity or are willing to confront the hidden realities of imprisonment through prisoner eyes. Intractable challenges those who shy away from the violent realities while examining the plight faced by prisoners written off and buried by their status as high-risk and dangerous: the "worst of the worst" in the system.

Intractable is a significant and deeply political work despite its unfortunate packaging as a macho, true-crime genre of "cops and robbers." In this sense, readers are encouraged to delve beyond the publisher's rather brutish marketing concept to uncover the contribution's true value. Matthews presents an engaging and often harrowing prison diary set against the backdrop of a retributive and violent prison culture and system. Also traced is the correlative emergence of a vociferous and militant...