Chapter 1

 

Following the enormous success of the abolition of prisons and the introduction of criminal slavery in its stead, COAG, The Council of Australian Governments, decided to reintroduce the judicious use of mild corporal punishment in the home and school - and after that success turned its attention to teenage gangs which had been a scourge of the nation for more than a generation.

And the remedy they came up with was severe corporal punishment for eighteen-year-olds and above in a closed environment that was not a prison. In fact, all of the prisons right across the world had now been razed to the ground and the land upon which they stood either sold or used for other governmental purposes.

My name is Josh Conroy and I had always been interested in the subject, or at least I had since I began to understand it in my middle teen years. I am certainly no goody-goody, but I do have a deep and healthy respect for the rule of law and how it keeps our various world societies on an even keel and the actions of these gangs, roaming the streets, spreading mayhem and near terror in local communities and particularly in elderly people living in their own home under the constant threat of a break-in by one or other of these gangs and suffer having their treasured belongings wrecked or stolen and themselves violated and often leaving themselves hospitalised and very definitely badly traumatised.

As a result of this interest and the desire to do something about it and in consultation with my parents and high school teachers, decided on a course of study that would equip me to take on these gangs and hopefully find a course of action to eradicate them.

Accordingly, I chose subjects associated with our social environment and eventually embarked on a university course with similar objects but also including psychology, eventually graduating with a BA heavily accented with the same emphasis.

In order to pay for this, I worked my guts out with such companies as Bunnings Hardware and McDonald's and I can tell you I had very little time for romance or recreation.

But still I felt I was not yet fully equipped to take on these gangs, and by that I mean devise a method of wiping them out and steering their members back into mainstream society. And so I then embarked on a doctoral thesis in psychology, studying these gangs, why they existed and of course how best to eradicate them.

I came from a decidedly middle-class background and neither of my parents were all that interested in the subject although they tolerated my passion for it. My tutors, however, understood it all too well and very much encouraged me to research its origins and the fact that repeated efforts by governments right across this nation of Australia had so far been totally powerless to even make a dent in their apparent popularity with teenagers and the younger twenty-year-old's.

My researches uncovered some interesting statistics about the membership of these gangs and particularly their leaders. I was quite surprised to learn that the membership came from all classes of society. They were certainly not just the down-and-outs and often included the children of wealthy or otherwise privileged parents. Why? I continued to ask myself and so once having graduated as a PhD, I decided to ask the Queensland Government to back me in an experiment aimed at discovering the raison d'être behind this weird movement, why it was so attractive to teenagers and the best means of breaking it up and destroying it for the future.

Of course their activities were already illegal, involving the beating up and stealing from small groups and individuals, breaking and entering private properties and going armed in public, to name just a few of their iniquities.

In the course of establishing my little corrective institution, I had many discussions and conferences with ministers and officers of the departments of justice, corrections, and those associated with various welfare organisations that had a peripheral interest in the gangs and I think I was able to get across to them that I was deeply interested in this problem and sincerely wanted to find a way to convince their membership of the evil in what they were engaged in.

This was going to be a very delicate operation. I knew that I needed to strike a balance between disciplining the subjects I was going to acquire without appearing to be a do-gooder whom they would automatically despise (as I suspect most people do anyway).

Perhaps here it might be useful to backtrack to the institution of criminal slavery. Its phenomenal success has been put down to the extreme nature of its formation in these modern times. Slavery as an institution has existed probably since caveman times and it has varied in its structure enormously both at different times and in different societies.

What its designers desired from this latest incarnation was that it be extreme in its severity and so make it more feared than any form of punishment yet developed or thought up in the course of human history. For example, upon sentencing to slavery for either a period or for the term of his natural life, the prisoner is stripped naked - totally naked. Not a stitch even to cover his or her genitals.

They are then subjected to the total eradication of all hair on their bodies below their eyes - and this is permanent. The hairs once removed by whatever method desired in that country, will never grow back.

Next, they are required to be worked at the hardest labour possible for a minimum of fifteen hours per day, every day of the week - no exceptions. It is quite illegal to purchase a slave and give him an easy billet. If caught, the owner will be charged and the only sentence possible in those cases is slavery for life. The requirement for hard labour is mandatory for the first year but after that, a slave with skills may be permitted to use them as long as he or she is worked for the required 15/7, every week of the year.

From the foregoing, you will appreciate that this punishment is certainly feared, so much so that the world leaders at the time fully expected to eradicate all crime. Of course it didn't happen.

That was long before I was born and over the years, it became recognised that there are some people in the world who simply cannot obey the laws and nothing any form of punishment can do, will cure them of their quite irrational desire to beat the system. And I'm sure you will not be surprised to hear that this applied more to the upper end of the criminal class more than the petty thieves who were very much more frightened of the penalty of slavery than their betters, most of whom my researches told me were sure they could beat the system.

The end result of all that is that those being sentenced to slavery now tended to be more the up-and-coming yuppies than the thugs of the past and so the prices they bought at the weekly auctions held around the world usually on Saturday mornings (but depending on the sabbath in those countries).

 

So far as restoring the former disciplinary responsibilities of parents and teachers is concerned, it was finally recognised that allowing a child to grow up without necessary and reasonable corporal punishment or even oral discipline has brought about absolute chaos in the home and classroom and while governments were and are concerned not to unleash sadistic punishments on children by twisted adults, the right to admonish severely, spank and even cane an offending child was restored although such punishments were to be administered with the child properly clothed. And all sorts of other checks and balances were added so that abuses were hopefully avoided.

But of course, once a person reached the age of eighteen years, he became an adult and was then subject to corporal punishment by the state. They could only be ordered by a judge or magistrate and in a prison, by the visiting justice (or their equivalents in other countries).

And so this is the milieu into which I was now attempting to isolate the teenage gangs that were causing so many problems everywhere. You may be wondering why the police could not now concentrate their efforts in locating and neutralising these gangs?

The answer to that is in the nature of the associations themselves. They had no bases, never congregated in the same place more than once, had the means of locomotion and instant dispersal and as I was to discover to my horror, some even had plants in the local police station.

Parents and siblings often did not know of their association with a gang and by no means did they meet on a daily basis, but one thing each and every one of them possessed in great measure was that they were street-smart.

In response to my activities with the government of Queensland, that state suggested to COAG that new legislation be enacted around the country creating street gangs as a quite separate criminal class from the rest and that accordingly a conviction under that legislation would automatically invoke the penalties created by it.

I had suggested to my government contacts that conditions similar to that of criminal slavery be invoked except that these criminals would not be sold on the auction block, at least not for their first conviction. After that it would be open slather and they would then be facing a life term as a criminal slave.

Why the differentiation, you might ask. The reason that I suggested this is that I had determined that the motivations behind these young criminals had to be very different from those of your normal offender and that I believed myself to be the best person qualified to investigate these motivations whilst at the same time punishing them for their crimes.

The government went along with my idea but indicated that they would be sending their own corrective services officers to work alongside me and reporting directly to them. I could understand this and applauded their actions. They also provided me with a perfectly normal house, although it was on the large side and with a substantial garden and tennis court and of course also a swimming pool.

What I had suggested is that we purchase a normal type house and garden to use as my base of operations but with its inmates kept in conditions similar to criminal slaves, that is naked and nude (this latter meaning permanently depilated of all hair below their eyes) and engaged on similarly arduous physical tasks for fifteen hours of the day. The correctional officers supplied to me would oversee them and monitor them at night while I would watch and talk to them, mostly individually, but sometimes as a group with a view to plumbing the very depths of their minds.

I believed that my psychological skills coupled with those related to sociology particularly as it applied to our own society, might enable me to establish the whys and the wherefores that made these misfits in society so different from the rest of us.

Our first batch resulted from the arrest of one of these gangs holus bolus and their being sentenced under the new laws relating to my little institution. That meant that I had them for a whole year after which their situation would be reviewed by the sentencing court, in this case, the District Court of Queensland.

This gang centred on the suburbs to the immediate west of the CBD of Brisbane that is a relatively up-market area and I wasn't at all surprised to find a couple of well-to-do young people among them while the others were mostly middle-class. There were five males and two females in this gang, all of them fit as the proverbial fiddles and very reasonably looking.

They were delivered to us in a prison wagon already stripped and denuded but apparently not in the least cowed by their experiences so far at the hands of authority. The vehicle drove in through the main gates which closed automatically behind them and then up the drive and around to the back of the house wherein was situated the garage complex that formed a wing off the back of the house and which boasted a flat above it that was going to be their accommodations for the duration.

I had had this suitably adapted according to their status as the equivalent of criminal slaves. That is, instead of sleeping on comfortable warm beds, they would each be allocated a plain wooden bench with a set of stocks at one end designed to hold the two wrists and neck and at the other end, another set for their ankles, this one capable of being slid up and down a groove to accommodate the shortest or tallest person. These are situated in what had been the main bedroom of the apartment. There were two others, both of which had also been similarly adapted. And there they would sleep locked down on their backs for the whole sleep period.

As they would be fed with Slave Chow, the pellets already mentioned, we had no need for a kitchen, and this too was then converted to yet another sleeping room for future gangs.

The bathroom had also been adapted for their purpose. The hot water pipe to that room had had an isolating valve inserted in it and this was turned off. The showerhead had also been removed so that the pipe emitted a single straight flow of cold water when activated from outside the recess, the tap inside being removed alongside the now shut off hot water equivalent. The glass walls of this recess had also been removed and replaced with iron bars. The aim here was to push as many of the gang that would fit inside this rather grim looking recess and then close and lock the iron-barred door and then from the outside, open the valve that allowed a torrent of freezing cold water to rain down upon them while we stood outside and directed them to soap one another's bodies down.

Feeding them was going to be simplicity itself. The department had supplied a Slave Chow dispensing unit and this was installed at the entry to the apartment. As they came or left, they would line up in front of this machine cup their hands under its chute and then press their forehead against the delivery bar that allowed a ration to drop into their hands. They then moved aside whilst swallowing the pellets as quickly as they could and the person behind them move into their place and be similarly supplied. On the way out of the building they could stop at a water spigot and down their fill.

And then it was out to start the day's toil.

Prior to their arrival, the correctional officers and I had discussed a number of projects that would strain their resources to the limit. I wanted to physically exhaust them every day and during it, particularly towards the end when they were already physically tired, single one of them out for a face-to-face.

These were conducted in another small room in their unit. It had previously been a larder but had been stripped of all cupboards and then painted plain white and with no ornamentation at all, the floor being also painted the same plain white.

For our discussions, I showed him how to sit lotus fashion and then did the same about a metre distant from him.

This first time, I had selected Toby Milliner, the gang leader as my subject. His father was a respected top-flight businessman in the city and his mother a paragon of Brisbane society. I already knew that they were appalled upon discovering what their son had been up to without them even guessing it. I thought he was the perfect first subject for my research and hopefully cure of his so antisocial behaviour.

I sat there silently staring directly into his rather handsome face and noting that like me, he was blond and blue-eyed and that his body reflected his love of sports for it was quite definitely extremely athletic.

Here perhaps I should mention my own sexuality as sex was going to become an important part of our correction of these misfits. I know that sounds confusing but I will explain it as we move through the retraining process. I am bisexual although not at all experienced in the practice of any form of sex as from puberty onwards, I was so heavily involved in study and earning money to pay for it that I just didn't have time to explore it in any detail except as my academic studies led to it.

I was aware, though, that it was very likely that I would be engaging in sex with this slave and perhaps the others if my researches into their psyches led me to believe that this might be necessary as part of their retraining.

On the score, I was aware, probably more than most, that sex is an extraordinarily powerful stimulus to human actions and reactions and I would use it unashamedly if I thought it might be useful in each case.

In this case, this young man with his fine blond hair, handsome face and superbly athletic body could give me a great deal of sexual pleasure. But I would not think of using him in this way unless I believed it might be useful in turning his psyche around. For example, if I found him to be totally heterosexual and that I wanted to shame him, I might well fuck him, force him to take my cock down his throat and up his arse. But I would certainly not do this simply for my own pleasure. And this I had explained in detail to the director-general of the Department of Corrections who had raised his eyebrows at me but when I had explained the psychological effects that sex and even the thought of it creates in us humans, he nodded and said he thought he understood.

I had grinned to myself at this. This man was a trained public servant and a very good one, but he had little or no knowledge of psychology.

Returning to that first interview with Toby Milliner, as I stared into his eyes, I was making every effort to discern his thoughts and attitude. No, of course I'm not suggesting that I had the ability to read his mind but the human face can be like an open book, giving a byplay of his emotions and probable thoughts as the expressions changed over the seconds.

Not so with this boy. Of course he wasn't really a boy. He was aged nineteen and therefore very much an adult but I refuse to refer to such people as men. Anyway, as I said, I immediately realised why he had become the leader of this group. I had also researched his schooling background and wasn't at all surprised to find he had been one of Brisbane's Anglican Church Grammar's top students with almost infinite opportunities in front of him. That he had descended to an idle life instead of going on to university, seemed incredible to me.

Furthermore, I had the distinct impression he was plumbing my thoughts in much the same way I was doing with him. This young man was going to be a difficult nut to crack, I thought.

His eyes had never left mine once since he had seated himself according to my directions but his face never once gave me any clue as to his thoughts. Now however, he upped the ante and slowly raised his hands from their place normal for what is called the Lotus position, that is clasped loosely together, palms facing up in his lap, to a position behind his head, drawing his elbows right back and then flexing his biceps muscles while never once moving his eyes from mine.

I knew exactly what he was up to, checking to see if I was sexually interested in his body and if he decided I was, would use that to his advantage whilst incarcerated here. I now decided that as his school record had indicated, this boy was close to genius if not actually being in that class. What the hell had motivated him to drop out of an extraordinary scholastic career to take up the leadership of one of these dreadful gangs.

I was able to keep my face as inscrutable as his, however, and I was pleased to see a tiny flicker of disappointment pass over his face. Round 1 to me, I thought.

We had now been squatting in that position for quite a few minutes without a word being spoken but then I changed things radically. "You are scum," I said softly but deliberately.