The Bureaucratic Hive At Work

Political Correctness Can Cost Lives

A New Zealand court case is proceeding which is likely to make the average citizen mad.  It concerns how parole is granted to imprisoned offenders.  In this instance a probation officer's critical report about a prisoner was removed from documentation by the Department of Corrections.  It is alleged that the Department at the time had a policy to get young offenders back out into the community as soon as possible.  One size fits all bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude.  How so?  Well, the prisoner in question was subsequently paroled and quickly went on to commit further violent offences.  

A probation officer suing his bosses for secretly removing safety warnings from a report to the Parole Board was proved right when the inmate attacked a man with a bottle just months after being released from prison.

The prisoner was jailed for attacking a man with a hammer in 2012, causing life-threatening injuries and previously stuck a knife in someone's ear. His probation officer Stan Gilmour assessed Rere Pumipi to be a high risk to the safety of the public but the paragraphs detailing the risk factors were removed from his probation report by his bosses.  These included references to alcohol and drug use, anger management and "deliberate steps to obtain weapons and use them". [NZ Herald]

In a rare move, the probation officer is taking his employer to court over the matter.
 There is no doubt that NZ Corrections sanitised the report so that critical data and assessments about the prisoner's attitudes and lack of rehabilitation were removed.  The probation officer is claiming that the actions of Corrections breached the Parole Act and the Corrections Act.

Mr Gilmour's lawyer, Warren Templeton yesterday told Justice Rebecca Ellis that statutory obligations make public safety paramount and require that the Parole Board have "all relevant information".  The Parole Act and the Corrections Act required reports to have robust risk assessments.

Mr Templeton told the court the allocated probation officer had a "special relationship" with the board and was the only person who went "into the field" to assess risk.  His client had run up against an agenda to see young offenders released into the community as soon as possible. Pumipi's prison case managers leaned towards release, said Mr Templeton. "Mr Gilmour was the opposite. They didn't like it so it got chopped. That is what was driving the criticism [of his contribution]. Mr Gilmour ran foul of prison case managers who had a different agenda."

The critical issues are these: the released prisoner subsequently re-offended, committing yet another violent crime.  This means that the Parole Board and NZ Corrections had it wrong.  It also means that the probation officer had it right.  It makes the suppression of his correct assessments all the more egregious.

Let's hope the Judge rules that Corrections has failed to meet its obligations under the Parole Act and the Corrections Act.  Let's hope the decision is sufficiently definitive that Mr Pumipi's subsequent victims can take a successful civil case against the department.   That will help Corrections get some focus.