PR queen Roxy Jacenko’s jailbird husband Oliver Curtis’s new prison home in 150-year-old freezing cold former mental institution
ROXY Jacenko’s convicted criminal husband Oliver Curtis is sharing his new prison home with crooked police, paedophiles and other high-profile inmates.
ROXY Jacenko’s convicted criminal husband Oliver Curtis is being housed in a 19th century former mental institution with crooked police, paedophile priests and high-profile inmates like Curtis.
Curtis, 30, is in Cooma prison, a five-hour drive from the multi-million dollar beachside apartment he shared with Jacenko and having to spend his meagre jail income on a doona to stay warm.
The disgraced former private schoolboy and convicted inside trading conspirator now rubs shoulders with 160 inmates, many of whom require special protective custody.
Curtis and other high profile inmates like him are sent to jails like Cooma to minimise the risk of a jail bashing from other prisoners happy to make a name for themselves assaulting a “name” mate.
More used to luxury cars, penthouse apartments and designer suits, Curtis now sleeps in a three-by-four-metre cell, probably with another inmate due to prison system overcrowding.
One of the prison’s main industries is textiles, but instead of the couture that ‘Oli’ is used to, inmates sew the standard prison greens which comprise the custodial uniform in correctional facilities across the state.
The availability of bottle green material at Cooma means the resident transgender inmates can fashion skirts and other attire more feminine than basic prison tracksuits, T-shirt and shorts.
Roxy Jacenko revealed on the Kyle and Jackie O show this week that she was depositing $100 weekly in Curtis’s prison bank account so that he could purchase “buy-ups”.
The weekly buy-up list includes toiletries, chocolate, biscuits and savoury food snacks, and even extends to packaged meals like pasta Alfredo, Singapore noodles and tofu with vegetables to supplement the nutritious but bland prison meals.
But Jacenko said Curtis would be using his buy-up money for something more useful in the Alpine Cooma climate, where it regularly drops below zero at this time of year.
“I have to put $100 in his buy-up every week. You can’t go over the amount. He’s buying a doona next because it’s cold,” Jacenko told KISS FM radio.
“He has a job, he works as a clerk in an administrative role. They go to the gym a lot.
“He’s said everyone is really nice. He has settled in as well as he can. He likes his job, it’s good to have a job.”
Cooma Correctional Centre, which first opened in 1873 and operated temporarily as a lunatic asylum in 1877, holds both minimum and medium security inmates.
The old sandstone block wings have been renovated periodically over the last century and a half, but remain cold and damp particularly during winter.
Cooma’s more notorious inmates of the past include paedophile priest Vince Ryan, the former Manly hotel proprietor who murdered his wife, Andrew Kalajzich, killer and escapee Graham Gene Potter and numerous convicted NSW police officers.
Curtis follows another white collar criminal to Cooma, HIH Insurance conman Brad Cooper, who spent part of his five-year prison sentence at the facility.
It is unknown whether Jacenko has yet pointed her white Porsche down the Monaro Highway to visit her husband in Cooma since he was moved there from Parklea prison.
But she batted back Sandilands question about whether she would be making a conjugal visit to Curtis, saying, “It’s not something that even crossed my mind”.
Conjugal visits, custodial visits during which an inmate and visitor are permitted to have intercourse, are not permitted in the NSW prison system.
Oliver Curtis, who like all inmates has been issued with a prison ‘MIN’ number (which stands for “master index number”), is being fed meals similar to hospital or other institutional meals made under the “cook-chill” method.
The food is methodically weighed and measured for its minerals and vitamins and served up in metal foil containers, given to each inmate at afternoon lockup which is around 3.30pm.
On the dinner menu are low salt and low fat meals like quiche, roast chicken, casserole, lasagne and curried chicken. Inmates complain that they are tasteless.
After lockup, Curtis will spend around 16 hours in his cell — solo if he’s lucky — reading from the prison library and watching television.
Prisoners are also locked in their cells each lunchtime for sandwiches and a piece of fruit.
He is allowed several phone calls each week to approved telephone numbers, although Roxy Jacenko revealed this week that one such phone call had left their daughter Pixie in tears.
Jacenko, who admitted she had told Pixie, five, and Hunter, two, that their father was away in China said she had made a “rookie error”.
“It was the worst thing. He phoned on a Saturday she cried for the whole day after. Her first words were: ‘When are you coming home?’.
“The older you are the worse separation is. I put her on the phone on her birthday and I regretted it.”
Visits by family and friends have their own inherent danger for Curtis, who like every inmate must undergo a strip search following a contact visit.
For each visit, inmates wear white jumpsuits which are back-zipped to reduce the potential for visitors passing over contraband.
But after visits, prison officers search inmates for any concealed items.
Following his sentencing to a maximum two years and minimum of 12 months, Jacenko described her husband as a “broken” man.
With good behaviour, inmate Curtis should be due for automatic release from Cooma prison in June next year when he can retrieve the dark charcoal suit and silk tie he relinquished two months ago, along with his once enviable life.
