In the early years of the colony, provided they did not manage to get back to England, the authorities did not really mind about escapees—it simply meant fewer mouths to feed. It is very difficult to say how many convicts did actually make it back ‘home’, as they were unlikely to boast of their escapes if they had. The authorities and the public would only learn about them when they were rearrested for some other crime. Those who did escape from Australia were generally one-time sailors who managed to sign on with passing ships or who commandeered a brig.
An early escape by boat, or at least a good story of an attempted escape, was that of an unnamed convict who stowed away in the hold of the Maitland while being transported to Australia in 1843. He had planned to arrive in Sydney undetected, and then assume the role of a free settler. Once he was missed it was thought he had fallen overboard and drowned. However, six weeks after his disappearance the captain suspected his champagne stocks had been tampered with. During a search to find if there was a hidden entrance to the stores the man was discovered. Later, while being transported to Van Diemen’s Land, the man made another dash for freedom. Apparently he was last seen paddling a stolen washing tub. This time he must have drowned.
One of the greatest escapes from an Australian prison by boat was also one of the first. Certainly as far as navigation is concerned it is considered to rank alongside the voyage of Captain Bligh after the Bounty mutiny. In March 1784 William Bryant, a Cornish fisherman suspected of smuggling and wrecking—luring ships onto rocks and looting them—was sentenced to death at Bodmin Assizes in Cornwall for impersonating two Royal Navy seamen to obtain their wages. The sentence was commuted to seven years with the first three to be served on the ship Charlotte before it sailed with the First Fleet. Also on the Charlotte was James Martin, sentenced for stealing bolts and screws, and Mary Broad, who had been convicted of highway robbery in Exeter and whose sentence to death was also commuted to seven years.
Bryant and Broad married in one of the first weddings after the Fleet landed. Bryant served out his time and given he was a sailor could have worked his passage back. However, a married convict could not leave his wife behind and return to England, and Mary Bryant still had two years to serve and there was no possibility of working her passage. They decided to escape along with their two children, James Martin and five other men from the First and Second fleets. In early 1791 William Bryant negotiated food supplies, a compass, quadrant and chart with the captain of the Dutch ship the Waaksamheyd. When it sailed on 27 March he and the others stole the governor’s clipper. There was no other boat in Sydney Harbour to chase them and so they sailed up the East Coast for the Dutch East Indies. On the way they survived storms, poor rations and hostile Aborigines before, sixty-nine days later, they landed at Kupang on Timor, explaining they were survivors of a shipwreck off the Great Barrier Reef. They were given food and clothing for which Bryant signed notes to be repaid by the British government.
It was unfortunate for them that on 15 September Captain Edward Edwards, along with the survivors of HMS Pandora, which had sunk off the Barrier Reef, and ten Bounty mutineers, arrived on the island. On 5 October they were handed over to Edwards who had chartered the Rembang to take his crew and the Bounty mutineers on to Batavia, from where he could find passages for them to the Cape of Good Hope. On the Rembang the prisoners were subjected to the harsh conditions for which Edwards was notorious. He had them put in chains and allowed them only enough food to prevent starvation. The captain of the Rembang had offered to provide a cabin for Mary Bryant and the children but Edwards refused to allow this. When the Rembang arrived in Batavia a month later some of the convicts, including William Bryant, were already suffering from fever and were moved ashore to the Dutch East India Company Hospital. Mary was allowed to accompany her sick son and husband. One of the men, Emmanuel, died in the hospital on 1 December 1791, and Bryant died there three weeks later.
Bryant and Emmanuel were the first of the convicts to die, but the navigator of the ship, William Morton, and Samuel Bird died of a fever on the passage from Batavia to the Cape of Good Hope. At this time they were still under the control of Captain Edwards and were kept in irons and only allowed on deck for an hour in the evening. Still in handcuffs, James Cox, possibly in a final escape bid, went overboard during one exercise time while the ship was passing through the Sunda Strait. At the time the shore was only two miles (3.2 kilometres) away so it is just possible that Cox survived although it would have been unlikely.
At the Cape of Good Hope Mary Bryant, her daughter Charlotte and the remaining convicts were handed over to Commander John Parker of HMS Gorgon, who was returning from Port Jackson. On this final leg of their journey back to England they received better treatment, with Mary being given a cabin to nurse Charlotte, who died on 6 May 1792 and was buried at sea. Also on the Gorgon were marines and their wives and children returning from Port Jackson. The marines included Captain Watkin Tench who had known the Bryants from the time when he was in charge of the marines guarding the Dunkirk prison hulk and had sailed with them on the Charlotte to Australia. Captain Tench took a rather more generous view of them than Edwards had done: ‘I confess that I never looked at these people without pity and astonishment. They had miscarried in a heroic struggle for liberty; after having combated every hardship and conquered every difficulty.’ On 7 July 1792 the surviving convicts appeared at the Old Bailey and were ordered to serve out the remainder of their original sentences. The Times considered the punishment ‘lenient’ but that they were ‘unfortunates’.
The writer James Boswell took up their cause and Mary Bryant was released in May 1793; the others in the November. For a time she received a small annuity from Boswell but the money was stopped by his family when he died in 1795. After that she disappeared from view. James Martin went on to write an account of the escape in his Memorandoms.1
The leniency the English courts showed the Bryants was seen as an encouragement: ‘Had those people been sent back and tried in this country for taking away the boat … we should not have any schemes of that kind projected now …’ wrote Admiral (later Governor) John Hunter.2 Even though, after the escape by the Bryants, security was tightened in Sydney Town, the escapes still came. Jonathan Boroughbridge and Michael Gibson were hanged in April 1798 for piracy after they stole two boats to use in an escape. The year before an Irish convict crew had captured the Cumberland, described as the ‘largest and best boat in the Colony’. Although a boat captained by Lieutenant John Shortland chased after them for over 170 kilometres, neither the Cumberland nor the Irishmen were seen again.
In Van Diemen’s Land, despite its isolated location, a number of convicts attempted to escape over the years from the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station on Sarah Island before it was closed in 1833. They included bushranger Matthew Brady, one of a group who had successfully escaped to Hobart in 1824 after tying up their overseer and seizing a boat. James Goodwin and Thomas Connelly escaped in 1828 and the two were the first white men to pass through the Lake St Clair region. Goodwin was later pardoned and subsequently employed to make official surveys of the wilderness he had passed through.
Sarah Island’s most infamous bolter was the Irishman Alexander Pearce, originally sentenced to seven years for theft, who managed to get away twice but never off the island. Both times he killed and ate his fellow escapees and although he confessed to the magistrate and chaplain on the first occasion he was not believed. It is said that just before he was hanged at the Hobart Town Gaol on 19 July 1824 Pearce said, ‘Man’s flesh is delicious. It tastes far better than fish or pork’.3
In 1829 a group of convicts led by ‘Captain’ William Swallow seized the brig the Cyprus and sailed first for New Zealand. Swallow, originally William Walker, a one-time British cargo ship apprentice and naval conscript in the Napoleonic Wars, had escaped before, in 1820. He made it back to England but was caught stealing, and again sentenced to transportation. Fortunately for him he had changed his name to William Swallow, as he would have been sentenced to death if his previous escape had been known.
Swallow was transported on the Cyprus, heading for Macquarie Harbour—described by the convict poet Frank MacNamara as ‘that place of tyranny’—on the west coast of Van Diemen’s Land. The ship was stocked with provisions, and this may well have been what tempted some of the convicts to take it over. Eighteen men took control when it was sheltering at Recherche Bay in the south-east of the island. They left the soldiers, sailors and those convicts who chose not to come with them on the beach and sailed for New Zealand. They repainted the vessel, cut off the figurehead, renamed it the Edward and forged a set of ship’s papers and a false log of a ‘voyage’ from Manila to South America. In a remarkable journey, the duly elected Captain Swallow sailed the Edward to the Chatham Islands and on to Tonga.
Opinion was divided about where would be best to go to escape the authorities—to the ‘Friendly Isles’ of Tonga or further away from New South Wales to either China or Japan. According to Swallow, the ‘China faction’ forced him to navigate the ship and they left the other seven members of the ‘Tonga faction’ on the island of Niue. When they made land in Japan, Swallow and his crew may not have realised there was a closed-door policy for foreign vessels.
The ship anchored on 16 January 1830 off the town of Mugi on Shikoku Island, where Makita Hamaguchi sent a samurai disguised as a fisherman to check the ship for weapons. The man recorded their ship, equipment and whatever he could understand via sign language and reported back. After several days they were told to leave and when they did not were fired on until they sailed off. From Japan the ship sailed to the Ladrones where four more left the ship. Swallow sailed on to Canton and the brig was scuttled there. Claiming they were castaways from another vessel, Swallow and three others worked their passage back to Britain aboard the East Indiaman Charles Grant. However, a man the mutineers had left in Canton confessed and by chance his account reached Britain a week before Swallow and his remaining companions arrived there.
In November 1830 Swallow stood trial with four others for piracy but he managed to convince the jury that, as the only person with any maritime experience, he had effectively been kidnapped by the other mutineers and forced to sail the brig on their behalf. He was acquitted and two others reprieved but, on 16 December 1830 at Execution Dock in London’s Wapping district, George Davis and William Watts were hanged by ‘Laughing’ Jack Hooper using a short rope, which meant a slow death by asphyxiation. They were the last men to be hanged for piracy in England.
Swallow petitioned against being returned to Australia citing his age, the distress of his wife and daughter and repeating that he had been forced to sail by the others. It was rejected. He was transported again with the two reprieved men and died four years later at Port Arthur. Until this century it was thought that Swallow had invented the tale of sailing to Japan but extensive research has shown that his account may well be true.4
After the 1833 closure of the Sarah Island jail, twelve convicts were kept behind at Macquarie Harbour to work on a brig the Frederick, under the supervision of a master shipwright, David Hoy, and a bunch of soldiers. In January 1834, the Frederick was duly launched and ten of the convicts immediately seized it and sailed south of New Zealand and on to South America. After six weeks they abandoned the ship off Chile’s coast and rowed a whaleboat 80 kilometres to shore, where they quite correctly passed themselves off as shipwrecked sailors. They were welcomed into the local community, some becoming shipwrights and marrying local women.
Six developed itchy feet and headed on to Jamaica and America. It proved a wise decision because the long arm of British law reached across the Pacific and plucked the remaining four out of their Chilean comfort and back to Hobart to face the gallows in 1837. At trial two of the bolters, James Porter and William Shires, or more likely their creative lawyers, ingeniously argued that they were not guilty of piracy per se, since their seizure of the Frederick had not taken place on the high seas but rather in enclosed waters. Further, it was contended, they did not steal a real ship as the Frederick was barely completed and not registered as such. It was merely a ‘floating bundle of wood and other materials’. The Chief Justice must have found some merit in these arguments because the men were spared the gallows but were sentenced to life on Norfolk Island. He may, of course, have had a perverse sense of humour.5
The conditions on Norfolk were truly appalling. In 1834 the authorities broke up a conspiracy to overthrow the troops and take possession of the island. Thirty-one men were condemned to death by a commission from Sydney. The Roman Catholic priest Father Ullathorne was sent to the island to tell the men just who had been reprieved. Some years later he wrote, ‘each man to be reprieved wept bitterly and each condemned man went down on his knees and thanked God’.6
Another who thought the sea was the route to freedom was the bushranger known as ‘Captain Melville’, but whose real name was probably Francis McNeiss McNeil McCallum. An early example of an ‘Intractable’ convict, on 3 February 1853 Melville was sentenced in Melbourne by Mr Justice Barry to a total of thirty-two years hard labour on the roads for highway robbery, the first three to be served in irons. On 10 June that year he tried to bite off the nose of a warder on a hulk in Hobsons Bay. This was quite a common practice among the roughest of the prisoners but, for his sins on this occasion, Melville was badly beaten and left in chains so that he could not lie down. After two days the chains were lengthened but he served another eighteen days in solitary confinement. Eventually Superintendent Price had him transferred from the President to the misnamed Success, moored at Point Gellibrand, and he was allowed to go ashore to work on alternate days.
On 22 October 1853 ten men, including Melville, tried to escape when they were being towed back to the Success after their day’s work ashore. One warder, Owen Owens, died from being beaten with a hammer during the attempt, and a seaman named Turner drowned. One of the convicts, called Stevens, disappeared, probably drowned after being shot by guards on the Success. Another, Richard Hill, was shot but survived.7
Perhaps inevitably, Melville was regarded as the ringleader and on 21 November he was sentenced to death but not before he had told the court of the brutality meted out on the hulks. The jury added a rider that they were not satisfied he had administered the fatal blows. Two more men were sentenced to death but surprisingly six were acquitted. However, Melville’s trial judge stated a case for the Full Court and, since it had not been proved that his transfer from the President to the Success was lawful, which meant he had not tried to escape from lawful custody, he was reprieved. Over a hundred years later Russell Cox effectively ran the same defence when he was charged with breaking out of Katingal Supermax.8
In the July Melville attacked Wintle, the Governor of the Central Gaol in Melbourne, and on 12 August 1857 he was found strangled with a large handkerchief in his cell. There was a pencilled note on the white-washed wall: ‘I intend to defeat their purpose and to die in my bed with a smile by my own hand and thus by my keen eye to defeat their most secret intentions.’ The inquest verdict was suicide but because of the difficulties of killing himself that way it was widely thought he had been killed by guards.9
Perhaps the most famous escape from Fremantle Prison in Western Australia was that of six Irish convicts in 1876. The Fenian movement or Irish Republican Brotherhood was a secret political society engaged in resistance against British rule in Ireland in the 1860s. After a number of Fenians had infiltrated the British military services, some sixty-two men were arrested and sentenced to transportation. They were lodged in Fremantle’s jail, then known as ‘The Establishment’, and in 1869 one of them, John Boyd O’Reilly, escaped on the whaling ship Gazelle. By 1871, after a series of pardons, only a small number of Fenians were left in Fremantle and three years later it was O’Reilly who obtained funds from Clan na Gael in Boston to launch a rescue mission.
In April 1875 the 200-tonne barque Catalpa, under the captaincy of George Smith Anthony and laden with legitimate cargo, sailed for Western Australia. It was not until a year later that the whaler landed and on 17 April six Fenians—one man, believed to be an informer, was left behind—who were on an outside working party escaped in carriages provided by Fenian agents. They were driven to Rockingham some 50 kilometres south of Fremantle, where Anthony had a boat on the beach waiting to transfer them to the Catalpa. Pursued by the steamship SS Georgette, Anthony raised the American flag and the Georgette turned away. The Catalpa arrived in New York on 19 August that year. Anthony never again sailed in international waters but was later presented with the Catalpa, which he sold. The vessel was finally salvaged in Belize. O’Reilly later became the editor of the Boston newspaper The Pilot.10
After that escapes by boat became generally less heroic, but a sort of boat escape in reverse, followed by a hopeless one, took place in 1878. Martin Weiberg, accused of stealing five thousand gold sovereigns in three sealed boxes from P&O steamer Avoca, was being taken from Sydney’s Darling Harbour to Melbourne. He persuaded the gullible police that he would take them to a spot where he had hidden some of the stolen gold. Weiberg told the officers that he had placed the coins in a kettle that he had lowered into the Tarwin River in West Gippsland, and he suggested that two of them take a boat out to midstream to retrieve it. When they were afloat, Weiberg pushed the remaining policeman into the water and was off. He was not retrieved for five months, by which time he had persuaded a friend, Joseph Pearce, to buy a boat called the Petrel with the intention of making for South America. They were hardly out of Port Phillip when the Petrel began to leak. She was beached at Queenscliff and the pair made off into the bush.
On 16 May Weiberg was captured near Cape Patterson. Both he and Pearce went on trial for theft with an alternative of receiving stolen property. Weiberg ran the defence that he had been given the money by a bearded stranger. A confession sworn before a magistrate in October 1878 had, he said, been extracted from him by an offer not to prosecute him. Weiberg and Pearce were found guilty of dishonest handling and received five and two years respectively.11
In 1867 the island of St Helena in Moreton Bay became a new ‘inescapable’ jail. ‘It is impossible,’ wrote the Visiting Justice in 1869, ‘for prisoners to escape from St Helena. I am convinced of it. They would have three miles to swim.’ What he did not say was that the area also had, ‘A very efficient police force around the island in the shape of sharks’.12 Over a sixty-year period, though, some fifty prisoners tried to escape, only a few succeeded. Most rarely got any further than the island mangroves and scrub where they were captured by searching warders, supplemented if necessary by police from Brisbane, or were driven out by hunger, or by the hordes of mosquitoes.
In June 1867, within five weeks of the island being declared officially a prison, the horse thieves Richard Dawson and Henry Morris, along with bank robber Edward Irwin, had a go and failed. In April 1868 two more horse thieves, John Bowman and John Burns, bolted with a view to swimming to Green Island and staying there until the heat was off. But the weather was unseasonably cold and they were found, still on St Helena, after a couple of days. They were each sentenced to thirty-six lashes but Burns could only take twenty-four and the remainder were remitted. On 24 April 1881 Thomas Wilkinson disappeared and although there were sightings of him for the next four days he always eluded the trackers and it was finally assumed he had drowned.
There was a successful escape two years later when on 23 December John Montmartin and James Tiffin got clean away cutting through their cell floorboards. Montmartin, who was serving ten months for stealing a yacht, had previously escaped from New Caledonia, killing a guard, and lasted on the outside until September 1889. At the end of his sentence he was returned to New Caledonia where he was guillotined. Tiffin was finally caught in July 1891.
One of the island prison’s most publicised episodes took place in November 1911, when prisoners Henry Craig, also known as Robert Colquhoun, and John Jones, also known as Joseph Mclntyre, disappeared for nearly two weeks. In November 1911 along with a man with convictions for robbery and breaking, then serving a seven-year sentence, Craig escaped again. Apparently suffering from cramps, Jones had been taken to the prison hospital where Craig worked. The next morning they were gone and an officer in charge of the Pilo Lighthouse reported seeing a small motorboat towing a dinghy. As a result most people believed they had escaped to the mainland and a search was undertaken across south-east Queensland. Warders still turned out each day to search St Helena from end to end, with police and Aboriginal trackers patrolling hundreds of kilometres of mainland coastline. The dinghy turned out to be a red herring because the pair failed to get off the island and on the twelfth day the prisoners reappeared. They had been hiding above the ceiling of the tailor’s workshop, where a fellow prisoner brought them food and water every day.
In 1914 an American, Frederick Sven Hamilton, who had a bullet wound resulting, he said, from fighting in Mexico, was serving a five-year sentence after holding up detectives at Toowoomba railway station and stealing £40 from the Exhibition Hotel in Brisbane. Described as a waiter but certainly someone who also had knowledge of the sea, he had made a small raft consisting of a galvanised iron bathtub and a table in March that year. He had tried to escape on it but decided it was too risky and jettisoned the contraption. He then hid out on the island for two days before stealing some planks of wood and making himself another fairly decent raft. He sailed off the next morning, rowing nearly as far as Fisherman’s Island, when he was sighted and picked up by the water police. He had been back on the island for only a few days when he made another escape attempt, this time in full view of the warders. Although he was liable to three years for each of the escapes, for the first, about which he told the jury, ‘if you leave the cage door open the bird will fly away’, he received eighteen months. For the second, described by The Telegraph as ‘a foolish escapade’, it seems he was dealt with by a visiting magistrate.13
Kidikur, an Aborigine also known as ‘Bad Peter’ and more often as ‘Burketown Peter’, was thought to have drowned in 1921 while attempting to escape. In October 1917 he had led a group of Aborigines who killed missionary Robert Hall and stole his shotgun on Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. They then attacked the mission where assistant minister Walter Owen was with his and Hall’s wife and their young children. Owen, who had been asleep, felt a pain in his shoulder and woke to find Bad Peter stabbing him and fought him off. Peter fled, leaving behind the gun. When the missionary recognised it as Hall’s gun, he knew Hall must be dead. The group of Aborigines then began a series of sporadic attacks on the mission. Owen, who cut slits in the mission’s iron walls with a tin opener to make apertures, fought them off for a week with the help of the women until the ketch Morning Star arrived. Originally eight Aborigines were charged with a variety of offences, including murder, but only Peter, regarded first and foremost as a good swimmer, fairly intelligent and who could write his name, was convicted. He had, it seems, wanted to clear out the missionaries and become king of the island.
On 18 January 1921 Peter escaped using a target frame as a raft, although at first it was thought he had not left the island and was surviving on a diet of oysters and fish while sheltering in the mangrove swamps. He had managed to paddle 2.5 miles (4 kilometres) from St Helena when he was spotted by the captain of the Pumuba, who offered to take him on board. When Peter declined, the captain threw a hook to try to snare the makeshift raft. Peter jumped into the sea and one of the seamen tried to grab him by his hair but it was too short to get a purchase. Peter slid below the water and, it is presumed, drowned and was eaten by sharks.
The only man to escape and manage to stay away from St Helena was 39-year-old southern gunman Charlie ‘Darky’ Leslie aka Ryan Fotheringham as well as Thomas Taylor. His motto was, ‘If at first you don’t succeed …’ Serving seven years for bailing up a taxi driver in Toowoomba he had tried twice to escape from Boggo Road in Brisbane. The first time in January 1923 was when he leapt over a veranda while he was being taken to hospital for an eye test. He managed to stay out of jail for a week. The next time was on 22 November that year with James Gleeson, who was serving five years in Queensland for armed robbery. Children watched them as they slid down a rope to get out. The escape had been well planned as clothes for them to change into had been left outside the perimeter. Unfortunately Leslie sprained his ankle in the drop and was soon caught, but Gleeson stayed out for a month, until he was found living in the bush.
Sent to St Helena, he disappeared from there on 26 November 1924. It cannot be said the authorities had not been warned. Two days earlier they had been told there was likely to be an escape attempt at seven in the morning. Sure enough there was. An inordinate number of southern criminals were said to be in Brisbane at the time and a boat had been seen the previous few days a hundred yards off the island, the occupants apparently fishing. The thinking was that Leslie was needed to advise and help in a job said to have been put up by Squizzy Taylor. Leslie was seen by a warder working in the prison garden that morning and then never again. It is thought that he managed a hundred-metre swim to the waiting boat. He was not found until 1944, when he was living in New South Wales. Queensland did not seek his extradition. He was last heard of in New Zealand in 1951.14
In March 1930 along with William Newberry, one long-term escaper John Sterling stole a boat and did get clean away. Newberry was recaptured after being arrested at a communist demonstration in Sydney in July that year. But it was not until 27 September 1934 that Sterling surrendered himself in Brisbane, saying he wanted to come out a free man. While on the run he had been in both England and America. The authorities were not unduly harsh. He was sentenced to two and a half months to begin when he completed his previous sentence.
By the 1920s the prison on St Helena was beginning to show its age and prisoners were transferred to Boggo Road. The last prisoner left the island on 15 February 1933.
On the soon-to-be-closed prison farm on French Island, south-east of Melbourne in Western Port, thirty-year-old Leonard Allen Knape and Allen James Bentley, then aged twenty-six, failed to appear at musters on 30 March 1973. Later prison officers found a makeshift raft on the shore outside the prison. The alert then went out that they had escaped and reached the mainland. It was a false alert as warders found them a short time later underneath the floorboards of a community cell. On trial in May 1974 the men, representing themselves, claimed they had not escaped but simply got drunk on prison brew before going to sleep under the floor. When they woke up they climbed out of the hole and, seeing television reports that they had escaped, they said they were afraid of being sent to the formidable H Division at Pentridge, and so they hid themselves again. No explanation was given for the makeshift raft that, of course, may have belonged to someone else. The jury acquitted them on 31 May.15
On 28 June 1989, 27-year-old Yit Sin Eng, serving an eleven-year sentence for importing heroin, broke out of Brisbane jail. He stowed away on the Princess Highway but the police boarded the vessel near Mooloolaba and captured him. He tried again on Christmas day that year along with armed robber Dallas Martin and two other prisoners. This time they attempted to cut through the roof of the C Division exercise yard. The men were consequently moved to the new Sir David Longland (now Brisbane) Correctional Centre in Wacol from the century-old Brisbane Gaol, which was soon to be closed down.16
And finally, for the present at least, Marcus Denis Mayne. With four months to go before he was eligible for parole on a bank robbery sentence, Mayne, then in Risdon Prison in Tasmania, working in the kitchen, escaped through an open roller door and two unlocked gates in September 2015. He was caught two hours later trying to get away on a yacht in Geilston Bay in Hobart. Unfortunately, in the meantime, armed with two knives he had broken into a house and taken from the street a sixteen-year-old boy as hostage. He took the boy several kilometres before he released him and, as the police closed in on him, he jumped into the bay and swam to the boat which he cut from its moorings. In April 2016, in a plea bargain claiming it was all on the spur of the moment, he received fifteen months with a ten-month minimum pre-parole period.17
So many escapes, both daring and well accomplished, have been marred by often-gratuitous violence towards prison and police officers, as well as towards members of the public.