The Sydney Morning Herald
VICTORIA, Australia — The Victorian government will spend almost $5 million to keep Victoria’s gangland thugs from attacking each other in jail or from contacting people on the outside.
This week’s state budget allocated $4.7 million for “managing high-profile, high-security prisoners, following prominent court cases” as part of a $657 million community safety package, The Age newspaper said on Thursday.
Corrections Commissioner Kelvin Anderson said the money would be used to employ 12 extra staff to cope with the demands of incarcerating high-profile inmates such as Carl Williams, locked up in the high-security Barwon Prison, near Geelong, for a minimum of 35 years for his role in four underworld murders and a plot to carry out a fifth,.
Williams and some associates are jailed in Barwon along with others connected to the infamous Moran family.
“We’ve seen by their nature that the crime has been very organised, and we need to make sure that we don’t provide any opportunity for breaches of security,” Mr Anderson said.
“We have to keep various parties separate and that takes more effort for us.
“Their activities, we have no doubt, have made some of them very unpopular with some prisoners in (the) mainstream.”
The new staff will include four extra prison officers, three more State Emergency Services Group officers responsible for prisoner escort duty and searches, three intelligence analysts and two people at the major offenders unit who assess, classify and place prisoners.
Prison authorities had to cope with the well-known main players in Melbourne’s underworld war and a host of minor players, Mr Anderson said.
Copyright 2008 The Sydney Morning Herald