Amid all the smoke, clamour and confusion of the riot inside Canberra's prison, detainee Chris Millington sat calmly eating an orange, watching it unfold around him.
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"It was mayhem," he said.
"I wasn't willing to put myself at risk by getting involved because you could tell it wasn't going to end well."
Yet little would he know nine days later, the executive director of ACT Corrections would sign an order which would send him, together with eight others, out of the Alexander Maconochie Centre and in his case, consigned to segregation - solitary confinement - at Goulburn's prison for three long months.
On the signed prison documents, he was wrongly described as "an active participant in an act of concerted indiscipline resulting in the destruction of prison property".
It was an injustice which should never have been allowed to occur. Mr Millington had been serving time for previous offences of aggravated burglary, arson with intent to damage property, and discharging a firearm in an act endangering life.
The authority to send the ACT detainees out of the system was never reassessed nor reviewed in a timely manner.
"Such decisions [to send detainees into the NSW prison system] are based on information available at the time and are not necessarily related to evidence of an offence," the Justice and Community Safety directorate admitted in a statement.
"The transfers were made to ensure the ongoing good order, safety and security of the Alexander Maconochie Centre after the loss of accommodation unit AU North.
"ACT Corrective Services does not investigate alleged crimes, nor lay charges before the court. This is the role of policing."
The spokesperson said decisions regarding whether inmates are segregated once inside the NSW prison system was "a matter for NSW Corrective Services".
However, a JACS Segregation Review Form provided advice to NSW Corrections to place the 31-year-old in solitary "pending police review".
ACT Corrections said that direction ended three days after each detainee went into the NSW system and any decision thereafter was left to NSW.
However, no review occurred. To all intents and purposes, ACT Corrections' duty of care ended when the men were shut in a prison van and sent away.
In September last year, almost three long years after the riot, Mr Millington finally was committed for trial on two charges: joint commission arson and joint commission property damage.
Then very quietly, in July this year, all charges were dropped against him by the ACT Director of Public Prosecutions.
The ACT DPP was unable to track the outcomes for all nine of the forgotten men. It said four had pleaded guilty to their involvement "and a further person is awaiting trial".
"Charges in relation to one person were withdrawn, in accordance with the DPP Prosecution Policy," it said.
Some of Mr Millington's friends and family say he should stay silent, shouldn't make a fuss about what happened to him and to just "let it go".
But for a bloke who admits he once had anger management issues that got him into trouble, he's now calmly determined to expose a vindictive and unjust ACT system.
While locked inside a four-metre-by-four-metre solitary confinement cell inside Area Two of Goulburn's high security prison, Mr Millington was denied contact with family and friends for weeks on end. He had received no legal advice.
"At first I thought it [solitary] was just for a few days or weeks but then it just dragged on and on for months," he said.
"I kept thinking, 'What happened to my human rights'?
"I was hoping someone in the system was going to say, 'Hang on, we can't do that'. But they did, and not just to me.
"I'm totally convinced they [ACT Corrections] looked around and decided there were a bunch of people they didn't want there and the riot provided an excuse to get them out, and no one would be any the wiser.
"And it's not just me. There are other blokes, too, who were sent off all around the NSW prison system at the same time."
A damning report into the November 2020 riot in the AU North block at the Alexander Maconochie Centre by the independent Inspector of Correctional Services put the total damages bill at $5.7 million.
Such was the bungled, confused command response, as detailed in the OICS report and admitted in the government response which followed, that this incident, together with several others, cost ACT Corrections commissioner Jon Peach his job.
A few weeks after the draft of the report landed on the desk of Justice and Community Safety supremo Richard Glenn, Mr Peach was transferred out of Corrections and into a plum management role in JACS' Security and Emergency Management division.
It was effectively a "golden parachute" where the senior executive retained his $327,000 annual salary but was able to disappear from public view while Corrections set about mopping up the expensive post-riot mess, both literally and figuratively.
Meanwhile, for those forgotten detainees whom ACT Corrections management had banished from their system, the punishment lingered on and on.
One perpetrator, 31-year-old George George, was found guilty of damaging two CCTV cameras and was involved in lighting or stoking five fires. He was sentenced to three years and with time served, will be eligible for parole in December.
For others like Mr Millington, who were accused and then exonerated, the injustice of what happened after the riot still burns deeply.
"This didn't just happen to me; it happened to several others as well," he said.
"Someone must be held to account."
