Imprisoning Resistance: Life and Death in an Australian Supermax

29 October 1987 Jika High-Security Unit Pentridge Prison Victoria Australia: Prisoner desperation over conditions and alleged official abuses of power escalates with a dramatic protest. Doors are barricaded, cells ransacked, a fire is lit. Jika's hi-tech automatic security fails, and prisoners are trapped. Arthur Gallagher, James Loughnan, David McGauley, Richard Morris and Robert Wright die of asphyxiation. Jika Jika is closed, and the official inquiries begin.

Imprisoning Resistance: Life and Death in an Australian Supermax resurrects the events leading up to the Jika Jika fire and deaths. Author Bree Carlton critically examines the political context and official justifications underpinning the construction of one of Australia's first hi-tech supermax prisons. Imprisoning Resistance provides a vivid, gritty account of state power and prisoner resistance, and revisits the controversy and the inquiries that followed the explosive 1987 protest fire and deaths. Calling upon official investigation transcripts, accounts by prisoners and prisoner interviews, Carlton unlocks a rare window into the closed world of Jika Jika as experienced by both prisoners and staff. Prisoner experience of isolation and sensory deprivation, lockdowns and mind games, and an ensuing culture of violence, stand in sharp contrast to official presentations of efficiency and security.

Twenty years later, Pentridge Prison and the infamous Jika Jika Unit are reduced to rubble, buried under a benign suburban development. Yet Jika's tragic history is not forgotten. In present times, the growth of privatised and supermax prisons, the detention of asylum seekers, and the controversial post 9/11 use ofindefinite detention, remind us that there are urgent lessons to be learnt from the failure of Jika Jika.