Brisbane's Boggo Road prison was Australia's most notorious jail operating for more than 119 years before it closed in 1988.
It was the scene of dramatic escapes, riots, hunger-strikes and roof-top protests which eventually led to the 'Commission of Review into Corrective Services in Queensland' to find out what was going wrong and how it could be fixed.
Written by Commissioner Jim Kennedy, the final report became known as the 'Kennedy Report' and it spelled the end for Boggo Road.
Now, 30 years later, newly released cabinet documents have cast fresh light on conditions in the notorious jail.
Lawyer Anthony Marinac, who helped compile the documents made publicly available by the state archives, said the Kennedy Review was one of the most significant decisions made by the state government in 1988.
"That went along with shutting down the old black hole isolation cells under the oval of Boggo Road jail, and really reforming what was in many ways still a 19th century prison system and starting to bring it into a more modern style of corrective services," Dr Marinac says.
He said the prison did not have regularised visitors for prisoners and there was still an entire block of prisoners at Boggo Road in 1988 who were using buckets as toilets overnight because there was no plumbing to the cells.
"It was positively ancient."
The papers also revealed corruption in the prison officers with guards revealed to be the primary means by which drugs were getting into the prisoners.
The guards and the union denied any corruption allegations.
"Unfortunately for them what happened later in 1988 was five very dangerous prisoners escaped from Boggo Road after getting their hands on 70 bed sheets as well as wires, which they fashioned into quite a sophisticated rope.
"They then got this long rope up onto the guard's catwalk and going over the side of the walls, which was obviously something which couldn't have happened without the assistance or at least contrivance of the guards, so it became quite clear that the corruption wasn't a figment of Kennedy's imagination."
Findings of the review noted that the 'Prisons Act' was outdated, drugs were entering prisons due to lax security, corruption was rife, officer training was poor, prisoners were not being rehabilitated, and the system was underfunded.
The Commission even heard that there was a counterfeit money operation at Boggo Road.
In response to the report, No.2 Division of Boggo Road was decommissioned and closed in November 1989, with the inmates being transferred to other prisons around Queensland.
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