Earwigs Scurrying For Cover

Politically Correcting the Corrections Department

The probation industry is fraught with tragic mistakes, errors, and pain.  It makes victim's pain more or less perpetual as successive probation hearings need to be testified at.  The anguish and pain to be re-dredged, re-remembered, and refreshed.  At times the Parole Board makes serious mistakes.  A paroled criminal re-offends and more victims suffer.

Now something even more serious has come to light.  The Probation Service and the Department of Corrections are bureaucracies (no surprises there).  Probation officers on the "front line" write reports about prisoners coming up for parole hearings.  Middle level bureaucrats in the Service and the Department of Corrections then edit the reports.  Clearly they want reports to have correct grammar and syntax.  If only.  In fact there is evidence that middle management wants probation reports to be politically correct.  They call it a "quality assurance check".  Now this may be entirely innocent.  Or not.

Pumipi, 22, was in jail for attacking a man with a hammer in 2012 and causing life-threatening injuries. In 2007 Pumipi stuck a knife in a person's ear.  According to documents filed in the High Court in Wellington last month, 15 paragraphs were cut behind probation officer Stanley Gilmour's back after his report had passed the department's quality assurance check. [NZ Herald]

This particular 22 year old has committed horrendous crimes.  When he was sentenced the judge acknowledged Pumipi's violence and anger and said he thought there was no way Pumipi would be released on parole unless those habits and traits were addressed.  But suddenly, Pumipi was out on parole just over a year later.  What a transformation the young man must have undergone--and so quickly, too.  Hmmm.  That will explain why he is now wanted by the police and on the run.

It turns out that, unbeknownst to the Parole Board, the probation report on Pumipi had been "sanitized".  The author of the original report, Stanley Gilmour is suing his employers for removing 15 crucial paragraphs from his report in the name of "quality assurance".

Mr Gilmour is seeking a declaratory judgment that the alterations and deletions were unlawful and breached the obligations of probation officers set out in the Corrections Act 2008 and Parole Act 2002, and that allowing the reduced report to go to the Parole Board under Mr Gilmour's name was illegal.  Probation officers are required by law to provide "all" information that a court or Parole Board may need and must treat the maintenance of public safety as their "paramount consideration". The Parole Board is required by law to consider "all" information.

Apparently, Gilmour's manager thought that his report was "too emotive"--which we take to be code for "insufficiently sensitive to the higher demands of political correctness".

The practice manager subsequently added notes to Mr Gilmour's report stating that he had authorised the changes because it "was not to [mandatory standard] and had victim information and too emotive comments", the claim said.

We are very pleased that this process of bureaucrats rewriting probation reports to ensure compliance with "mandatory standards" is going to be tested in court.

We would like to offer a very simple solution.  Sunlight sanitises.  Always.  Therefore, two versions of a probation report should be presented to the Parole Board.  The first version must always be the original case officer's unexpurgated report, standing as written.  The second version can be the edited version with all the subsequent edits and editors identified--a facility universally available in modern word-processing programmes.

Bureaucrats, as a breed, tend to hate exposure.  They, like earwigs, prefer to hide in the rotting log.  They always plead the system, the standards, the rules, and the regulations as their defence for not standing up and taking responsibility.  Full marks to Stanley Gilmour for standing up. Watch the earwigs scurry as the sunlight shines on them.