KEY POINTS:
The downhill slide of Graeme Burton after his release from prison made sad reading in newspapers yesterday. It sounded all too typical. Released to live in a lonely single-bedroom flat in the company of a mother who hardly knew him and did not stay long. Not much furniture, not much money, no means of identity to do ordinary things like open a bank account. But Burton did not help; missing appointments with supporters, not turning up for his sports institute course, turning to drugs and extortion of criminal associates to support himself.
None of this is surprising, nor is it an indictment of the probation service. Burton left prison with as much reintegration planning and institutional support that a society can reasonably be expected to provide. What is an indictment of the probation system is the failure to return Burton to prison as soon as he started breaching his parole.
"Zero tolerance" was a term much vented by Corrections Department psychologists and others when the Parole Board was preparing to release the convicted killer who still carried a medium-to-high assessed risk of reoffending. Zero tolerance suggests to most people that the offender is to be put straight back inside at the first sign of trouble.
But to the police who learned Burton was haunting the Wellington underworld, "taxing" drug dealers and using P, zero tolerance meant that investigative wheels were put in motion. And the probation officer who went on holiday after Burton failed to report as required, zero tolerance meant she would attend to it as soon as she returned.
It was not until December 29, a month after the probation officer had last seen him, that the board issued an order recalling him to prison. By then, he was on the run and armed. A week later, he was captured in a shoot-out with police but not before he had killed a cyclist and fired at two others.
Almost as worrying as the performance of the board and the probation service in this case is the reluctance of reviewers to criticise them in more than the mildest terms. The reviews released this week have been not so much whitewash as transparently sympathetic. The reviewers have not tried to hide or disguise inadequacies; they have laid them out clearly for anyone who bothers to read their full report but their conclusions are soft to the point of evading the issue.
An example: Reviewing the board's decision, Chief District Court Judge Russell Johnson and Melbourne forensic psychology professor J.R.P. Ogloff were asked the question: "On the information available to the board, was the decision a reasonable one?" After discovering that the board had been alerted to the fact that Burton was suspected of assaulting other inmates and had been transferred to another unit just a month before the board was to consider his case, the reviewers concluded this:
"Having made the judgment that the unprovable allegations about Burton's conduct should not be taken into account, the decision to grant Burton's application for parole was reasonable." There is a term for that conclusion. It is cop-out. The question Judge Johnson and Professor Ogloff were asked to answer required their judgment about whether the allegations should have been taken into account. In the body of their report, they suggest the board should have inquired more closely into the incidents involving Burton. Why then exonerate the decision and, by implication, the board's failure to better inform itself as "reasonable".
The father of the murdered cyclist feels sorely let down by these reviews. He is not alone.
