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.

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.