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During his 13 months in solitary confinement, Cardinal George Pell nearly gave up hope of appealing his prison sentence, but encouragement came from an unlikely source: the jail warden.
Pell, who died overnight in the Vatican at age 81, revealed this in his three-volume memoir Prison Journal, which recounts his experiences incarcerated in two Victorian jails before the High Court overturned his conviction for sex crimes. against minors in 2020.
After losing an appeal against his six-year sentence in the Victorian High Court, Pell says he considered not appealing to the High Court despite always maintaining his innocence.
He explained that he feared that the judges would “just close ranks” and that he did not want to participate in an “expensive farce.”
Cardinal George Pell (center of photo), who died overnight at age 81 in the Vatican, is summoned from court to begin serving a six-month sentence for child sexual abuse.
However, he says the ‘boss’ of Melbourne’s assessment prison, who was ‘a bigger man than me and a straight shooter’, urged him to continue pursuing his appeal.
“He encouraged me and I remain grateful to him,” he wrote.
Following his conviction in March 2019, Pell was forced to forgo his church vestments for a green tracksuit from the prison uniform, though he was later given a red one at Barwon jail in recognition of his cardinal rank.
At the Melbourne jail, where he spent 10 months, Pell was placed in a solitary confinement cell in the same room as 11 other inmates whom he never saw but certainly heard from the corridor.
Pell (pictured front centre) arrives at Melbourne County Court in 2016 while fighting child sex charges which later saw him spend 13 months in jail before the High Court overturned all convictions.
“I positioned myself at the Toorak end, named after a wealthy Melbourne suburb, exactly the same as the noisy end but generally without the yelling or yelling,” he wrote.
The former Archbishop of Melbourne said he “would marvel how long their fists could punch, but a keeper explained they kicked like horses.”
“Some flooded their cells or made them dirty,” he wrote.
Every once in a while the dog brigade was called in, or someone had to be gassed. On my first night I thought I heard a woman crying; another prisoner was calling his mother.
As a convicted child sex offender, Pell was separated from other prisoners for his safety, but on one occasion he was confronted personally.
The Melbourne Assessment Prison where Cardinal George Pell spent 10 months in solitary confinement
When exercising alone during one of the two half-hour periods allowed outdoors, he was walking through a walled courtyard when he passed through a head-high opening.
“Someone spat at me through the fly wire of the gaping opening and started condemning me,” Pell wrote.
‘It came as a complete surprise, so I stormed back to the window to face my attacker and berate him.
“He bolted from the front line out of my sight, but continued to condemn me, as a ‘black spider’ and other less than complimentary terms.”
After telling the guards that he would not go out into the yard again if the ‘young delinquent’ was around, Pell was told that the inmate had been transferred for doing something ‘worse to another prisoner’.
During nearly 16-hour lockdowns in his spare cell, which contained only a shower, desk and bed, Pell said he heard other prisoners abuse him, but also some “fierce” arguments about whether he was guilty.
According to Pell, one of the guards said that the consensus among “career criminals” was that he had been “outed.”
The guard added “that it was strange that the criminals could recognize the truth but not the judges,” according to Pell.
Cardinal George Pell arrives at the Good Shepherd Seminary in Sydney after the High Court acquitted him of the child sexual abuse convictions that put him behind bars.
“Most of the guards at both prisons acknowledged that I was innocent,” Pell writes, saying that even the guards who were hostile to him acted professionally.
Although his faith in Australia’s criminal justice system was shaken, Pell wrote that his Christian belief was not shaken during his confinement.
“I never felt abandoned, knowing the Lord was with me, even though I didn’t understand what I was doing for the better part of 13 months,” he wrote.
He even discovered some redeeming features of life within himself despite the humiliations of being strip-searched and even being denied a simple request to get a broom to sweep his cell.
“Prison life removed any excuse that I was too busy to pray, and my regular prayer schedule sustained me,” he wrote.
When she saw that a former occupant had scrawled the word “home” on the glass of her cell window, she wondered if it was a bitter lament.
“I suspect not, as this is my home at the moment and not a terrible place,” she wrote.