HM Prison Barwon or informally Barwon Prison, an Australian high risk and maximum security prison for males, is located 6 km from the township of Lara, near Geelong, Victoria, Australia. The facility is operated by Corrections Victoria. The prison provides accommodation and services for remand and sentenced prisoners detained under Victorian and Federal legislation. Barwon Prison is located adjacent to the 559-bed medium security Marngoneet Correctional Centre, opened in 2006.

History

Barwon was built to cater for demand due to the recent closures of HM Prison Geelong in 1991 and HM Prison Pentridge in 1997. Construction of the prison commenced in 1986. The works were carried out by Thiess Contractors. It was completed in October 1989 and the first prisoners were received in January 1990. Barwon is the only Victorian maximum security prison located outside the Melbourne metropolitan area.

Accommodation units

Barwon provides accommodation and services for maximum security mainstream prisoners including a 20-bed facility for high security prisoners and a 60-bed facility for maximum security protection prisoners. A campus of the Box Hill Institute of TAFE operates at the prison providing a corrections education program. The prison is split into many separate units including:

Incidents

In April 2010, convicted Melbourne gangland murderer and drug dealer Carl Williams was beaten to death inside the Acacia Unit by fellow prisoner Matthew Johnson. A 2012 art exhibition called The Barwon Interviews, comprising video footage of twelve inmates, was part of a Monash University PhD project that was focused on examining prisoners adjusting to life inside Barwon Prison, their family struggles, and guilty consciences. In February 2012, while visiting Barwon Prison to speak to Indigenous inmates as part of a mentoring program, former AFL player Wayne Carey was found to have traces of cocaine on his clothing following a routine drug scan. Carey was informed that he could enter the prison if he submitted to a strip search. He declined and left the correctional facility. In November 2014, a prisoner strapped a homemade explosive device to his body. The device was made partly from ground up matchheads and triggered a lockdown in the facility. Victoria Police specialist teams including the Critical Incident Response Team and the Bomb Squad were brought in to deal with the prisoner, who was subsequently charged and received extra time on his sentence. In October 2015, several prison officers were injured in an unprovoked attack in the Grevillea unit of the prison. Two prisoners assaulted the officers as they were being led back to their cells from exercise. On 11 February 2019, two members of Barwon Prison's Pacific Islander 'G-fam' group stood over Tony Mokbel and stabbed him with an improvised knife. He also received a fractured skull and loss of teeth in the attack. It is likely that the attack was a result of the previous day's newspaper headline story, that Mokbel was being an 'enforcer' within the prison and one of the men also accused the drug kingpin of "talking to the screws, you f***ing dog!"

Notable prisoners