KEY POINTS:
In public affairs, as in private ones, actions speak louder than words. The Government has tried to hang tough, but it has failed to dispel the clear impression that Corrections is a department in deep crisis. The fact that PM Helen Clark has begun to take control of matters is not exactly a vote of no confidence in her minister, Damien O'Connor, but it's the next best thing.
O'Connor made a serious lapse of judgement in the House this week when he said he felt like "almost apologising" to the family of Wainuiomata father-of-two Karl Kuchenbecher, killed by the inadequately monitored parolee Graeme Burton, because the Nats had used them for "cheap politicking".
As was obvious to anyone except, apparently, O'Connor, this was cheap politicking. No family deserves an apology more than the Kuchenbeckers and O'Connor's "almost" apology was transparently a piece of political rhetoric which served only to underline the absence of a real, meaningful expression of remorse.
If the outburst suggested a man under pressure, it is with good reason. In the past year, Corrections has achieved the dubious distinction of unseating Child, Youth and Family as the most dysfunctional government department. The murder in a prison van of Liam Ashley; the unconscionable delays in producing a report into the system failure that led to that killing; the unforgivable failure to keep the dead teenager's parents in the picture; the unbelievable failure to monitor Graeme Burton's parole; the inexplicable two-week delay in even beginning to go after him when he breached it; were bad enough and exacerbated by attempts to gloss over the extent of the blunders.
But the recent revelations - eight Rimutaka Prison guards have been stood down and another three face the same fate while allegations about the supply of contraband to inmates are investigated; one convicted rapist has had conjugal visits and another has been assisted, with the guards' connivance, to father a child - paint the picture of a department in utter disarray. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Corrections is notoriously the most obstructive of any department when it comes to answering requests under the Official Information Act.
The department's chief executive, Barry Matthews, a former senior police officer, is a good crisis manager - he is highly regarded for his handling of police corruption in Western Australia during a six-year stint as commissioner there. But he has his hands full here.
In many ways, the department is on a hiding to nothing. If its shortcomings were to be shown to be the result of inadequate resourcing, it could not count on great public sympathy. Law-abiding people having trouble getting their health and education needs met from budgets under pressure are unlikely to look kindly on calls for more money to be spent on the needs of locked-up crooks. Neither is anyone about to make public and official pronouncements about how hardened crims with access to drugs and contraband are more docile and manageable than those held under strict control: those who argue that prisoners have an easy life have probably never seen the inside of a jail, much less tried to run one full of agitated and resentful men.
All that said, the Corrections Department needs urgent corrective procedures of its own. A wholesale inquiry into the way it is run is probably not the best idea, since such inquiries can so easily be used to sweep embarrassments off the political stage until they are forgotten.
But it is idle to imagine that the alleged corruption is unique to Rimutaka. It is well past time for the beleaguered department to submit to some outside scrutiny. The public, the victims of crime - and, yes, the criminals too - deserve as much.
