Backed by Governor Denison, Price was answerable to no one but himself and he invented a series of punishments to cow his wards. Routine work cutting coral was done while chained to 36lb weights. Inmates were subject to flogging for the slightest infraction, and putting balm on a flogged man's wounds became an offence. His innovative corporal punishments included much use of restraints such as a cage over the head with a prong that immobilised the tongue and made breathing difficult, or an all encompassing steel frame that men were kept in for more than a week. By 1852 public disquiet caused Denison to privately remonstrate with Price. Hughes' claims that, in Hobart "the suspicion that the commandant was out of control, that the island's remoteness from Hobart had permitted some cancer of his soul to metastasise wildly, could not entirely be allayed". He hints at a connection between Price's unspecified illness in 1846, and "the morbid ferocities of his rule".