An investigation by the ABC has confirmed that more than 35 violent deaths in Australia have been linked to men who attended the same boys home when they were teenagers.
Fifteen of these deaths led to convictions for either murder or manslaughter.
The Institution for Boys Tamworth was opened in 1947 to accommodate boys who absconded or otherwise misbehaved in other boys homes.
It was attended by some of Australia's most infamous killers and criminals.
''It gave you the killer instinct,'' said Bob McCluland, 67, who was sent there for five months in 1962.
"Anyone crossed you, you'd just cut their throat,'' he said.
Described as a "concentration camp", "Alcatraz" and comparable to "a prisoner of war camp during World War II", it was once a colonial jail where prisoners were flogged and hanged.
Once transferred there, boys were not allowed to speak to each other or look at each other.
They slept in solo brick-walled cells which were freezing in winter and oppressively hot in summer.
The ABC reports they had steel buckets for toilets and the only light came through an iron-barred hole.
Their punishments included beatings, food deprivation, isolation, pushing heavy sandstone blocks across the floor and being forced to walk around with cardboard boxes on their heads.
The Institution for Boys, Tamworth was later renamed Endeavour House and some communication between inmates was permitted. A spate of inmate suicides finally forced its closure in 1989.
The building is now used as an adult prison.
