Overview

Nominated in the True Crime Category for the 8th Davitt Awards. These awards recognise the best crime novels and true crime books written by Australian women, published in 2007. 29 October 2007 marks twenty years since the death of five prisoners in a riot and fire in the infamous Jika Jika high-security unit. This book resurrects these events and invites us to learn urgent lessons in our current age of supermax and privatised prisons, detention of asylum seekers and the controversial use of indefinite detention under the banner of a 'war on terror'. Imprisoning Resistance provides an experiential account of life and death in the controversial Pentridge Prison Jika Jika High-Security Unit in Victoria during the 1980s. One of Australia's first hi-tech supermax prisons, Jika Jika was designed to house and manage the system's 'worst of the worst' prisoners. Several years of deaths in custody, multiple escapes, assaults, murders, prisoner campaigns and protests, hunger strikes and allegations of prison staff brutality escalated in 1987 to a dramatic protest fire that resulted in the deaths of five prisoners. The prison was closed and a series of inquiries were commissioned. Bree Carlton revisits this uncomfortable past and reconstructs events leading up to and surrounding the fire and deaths, while critically analysing official responses to the discreditable episodes, crises and deaths that plagued Jika Jika.

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Bree Carlton in Imprisoning Resistance offers a committed researcher's account of the transition from H Division at Pentridge prison in Victoria to the high security Jika Jika unit which operated from 1979 until its closure as a high security unit after the October 1987 fire that claimed the lives of five prisoners. Importantly... the book focuses on transitions and transmission, the deeply flawed attempts to transfer the problematic functions of high security prison regimes into new architectural setting and 'new' control regimes, in part a shift from control and punishment through direct and brutal physical violence to forms of enviromental and psychological control, or what the Jika Jika prisoners often referred to as 'mind games'... - David Brown, Emeritus Professor, University of NSW, Current Issues in Criminal Justice, Volume 21 No 1, July 2009

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