Ghosts......of the Civil Dead

The inmates and guards of a modern, clean and efficient maximum security wing are slowly and increasingly brutalised until they erupt in violence. Dark and macabre, and based in truth, the story is told in a traditional dramatic style combined with telephone interviews and narration.

More than ever, this dark postindustrial vision of the cacereal society, where one man is imprisoned in order to lock up the minds of the entire world, is relevant. The cruel and brutal inevitability of the prison system, where boys are mutilated into men, with violence and fear, power and intimidation. Everything has a price, and a cost. In this savage account of an isolated maximum security prison in the Central Australian desert that is in lockdown. Pressure is building in the facility and the weak will not survive what is coming. It is almost like the screws are making it happen. Boiling the pot hotter and hotter, until it boils over. And it will.....Welcome to Hell.

Ghosts... of the Civil Dead is a 1988 Australian drama-suspense film directed by John Hillcoat. It was written by Hillcoat, Evan English, Gene Conkie, Nick Cave, and Hugo Race. It is partly based on the prison diaries of Jack Henry Abbott.

The story is set in Central Industrial Prison, a privately run maximum security prison in the middle of the Australian desert. An outbreak of violence within the prison has resulted in a total lockdown. A committee is appointed by the prison's governors to investigate the cause of the outbreak, but their findings are in stark contrast to the facts behind the riot.

It is revealed that both the prisoners and the guards are slowly and deliberately brutalised, manipulated and provoked into the forthcoming eruption of violence by the government and the private company that runs the prison, in order to justify the construction of a new and more "secure" facility.

The script was based on the book In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott and research done with David Hale, a former prison guard at Marion, Illinois. who features as a character in the film.