ABSTRACT
In 1970 all prisoners in Bathurst gaol, New South Wales (NSW), Australia, were subjected to a cell-by-cell bashing led by the prison superintendent, as a reprisal for taking part in a peaceful protest. Four years later Bathurst gaol was nearly razed in a major riot and fire, followed again by reprisal bashings. After a delay during which prisoners were charged with riot offences, a Royal Commission headed by Nagle J of the NSW Supreme Court was established in 1976 and handed down its influential Report in 1978 (see Vinson, 1982; Zdenkowski and Brown, 1982; Findlay, 1982). In the Report Nagle called for ‘a building plan to be drawn up until the year 2000’, the aim of which ‘should be to replace old gaols which cannot immediately be satisfactorily altered by new facilities’ before expressing the hope that ‘the prison population will not necessarily continue to increase proportionately to any population increase because of, inter alia, the adoption of alternative modes of punishment and improvements in the organisation of society’ ( Nagle, 1978: 25).
