“There must be criminal prosecutions. There must be disciplinary consequences. There must be a new management team for ACT Corrections.” HUGH SELBY affirms his belief that the Alexander Maconochie Centre needs a deep, deep clean.

This is a castle game. You don’t need a gaming console or a streaming service, but as a player you do need to move through the castle, study what’s going on, and then decide how conditions in the castle are to be put right.

To get into the castle all entrants must pass security. Those being taken to the dungeons go through airport-like scanners, but for others it seems much easier, rather too easy.

Within the castle there are four classes of workers. The ravens work in the dungeons and the lower floors. They make sure the denizens of the dungeons, the prisoners, stay in line and are not seen or heard. 

There is a pecking order among the ravens. The most powerful have beautiful, shiny attire. Those regarded as too soft on the prisoners, or too inquisitive about this and that, have their feathers pulled before being thrown off the towers. This ensures that the other ravens, like the prisoners, stay in line.

The slitherers, as their name suggests, go up and down the castle layers, picking up and delivering messages. They are felt, rather than seen. Nods and winks are not accessible under Freedom of Information.

The hufflers, so named because they huff and they puff, inhabit the upper corridors and suites, looking and sounding important. 

Fourth and final are the griffins. As everyone knows, the griffins bring power, courage, intelligence, and leadership. There is a room for the griffins at the top of the castle. It is locked and dusty. Griffins have not been seen for more than a dozen years.

The accepted wisdom is that griffins will appear when it seems that all is lost. They will defeat squawking, corrupt ravens and complacent, “hear nothing, see nothing” hufflers. That, at least, is the legend. 

Guerilla board postings

There are leaks in the information system. Damaging revelations appear ever more frequently on the notice boards. Some of the hufflers are demanding leak inquiries, but the more experienced know how dangerous that can be. Some of the ravens are looking sickly and taking stress leave. The slitherers just slither as always. 

There’s a dude who looks homeless and harmless, but may be neither. He pushes a supermarket trolley loaded with print outs of articles about the dungeons. He has taken to leaving them here and there. (psst. You can find them by typing “AMC”, “ACT prison problems”, “ACT deaths in custody”, “AMC staff drug parties” and similar terms into the magnifier search line of the online CityNews).

A few examples drawn over the last five years from a surprisingly large number of articles demonstrate this irrefutable summation: The AMC (being the dungeons and its management) is a disgrace – a disgrace for penology, a disgrace for accountability mechanisms, a disgrace for ACT government transparency, a disgrace for notions of what we can expect from an opposition, a disgrace for human rights which in the AMC are farcical, a disgrace for the AFP’s failure to investigate crimes by staff, but above all a disgrace to us. 

Here are just a few examples.

Retired professor Ross Fitzgerald, who served for 28 years on NSW and Queensland Parole Boards, and so is familiar with how prisons both do work and should work, was anything but positive in 2024 about the AMC and its management in this piece. 

In 2022 then Inspector of Custodial Services, Neill McAllister, reported on a 2021 fire started in a high security area by prisoners allegedly drunk on “home brew”. What did they have to do to get the ingredients and the equipment? Not clear enough? Try, “Who was paid?” 

Mr McAllister’s report has been ignored – see our most recent article on Corrections’ dismal latest annual report. It’s here. He said in 2022, 

“When detainees are bored and locked in units on a daily basis, they turn their minds to ways to break the monotony…

“Almost all detainees were in their unit during the day… in other jails detainees would be engaged across the jail in work, industries, education, programs, recreation, and other activities”.

Remember that old saying, “idle hands are the devil’s work”. It’s not the prisoners who are to blame for their hands being idle.

Last year Andrew Fraser, an experienced criminal defence lawyer here in Canberra, and formerly a highly regarded journalist, reported: “The (AMC) is run by a clique, with detainee bashings covered up, staff bullied into silence and the library better labelled “a supermarket” where any drug desired was freely available”. Here’s his full piece.

How many readers recall this expose from five years back? 

“I was placed in solitary confinement for the first month of the detention…(it) took a compassionate and able psychiatrist to demand my movement into more suitable accommodation for the sake of my safety.

“I was effectively buried during my time, and then placed in the sexual offenders’ wing with 36 men that included some of the most evil and depraved examples of humanity I have… seen in my life.

“Drugs were ever present…

“I did own a number of mobile phones, which were both expensive and a danger to be caught with. We blatantly bought them from the guards. And I have no problem admitting this given the genuinely amazing and wide penetration of contraband into the prison.”

In 2022 CityNews reported the allegations of Tim Rust, a departed senior officer at the AMC, about staff “drug parties” and “sex with a former prisoner”. 

Some weeks later there was a follow up article as other people had come forward to corroborate those claims.

Drug claims: ‘I’m so glad this has come to surface’

Quite apart from the illegality of the drug taking, it needs to be grasped (regardless of views about drug use), that these activities are grist for staff and inmate blackmailers, coercive control, developing drug dependency, and creating significant debt that can be used to require criminal conduct by the debtors when they are released from the AMC. 

But let’s go further than these articles. My current sources are reliable. There are some staff who, no matter what their known faults (as openly stated at meetings by senior management), be that cocaine using, or repeated incompetence, are Teflon treated. That is, despite written complaints being made about them, there are no disciplinary or criminal charge consequences.

Those mid-management staff who try to do their job are stymied by upper management. When, foolishly, they persist they experience unpleasantness. So they leave, which solves the problem for upper management. As one of these middle managers nicely put it: “If you raise an issue then you are the problem”.

Top-to-bottom spring cleaning

Autumn is coming. That leaves winter for the government and public servants to make the preparations for a deep and thorough spring clean of the AMC, a cleansing of Herculean scale.

But a search of the many articles these past five years and the deliberate, repeated decisions by our local politicians (of all three parties) to take no action, no matter how serious the corroborated allegations, tells every reader and everyone that they talk to, that nothing will happen unless Chief Minister Andrew Barr decides that “no action” is no longer an option for him and his coterie.

The evidence is clear: deaths, arson, criminal and disciplinary misconduct acts by staff, high recidivism, inadequate rehabilitation services, highest per prisoner cost in Australia for nothing more than guarding duty – none of these seem to matter to Barr.

Re-election is the only game in his town.

Hercules and Co are the first step. Their team will have three cleaners: the leader who revels in the challenge and builds effective problem-solving teams, one who has a deep knowledge of penology, public policy and politicians, and one who well understands the situation of being a prisoner because they have been there, done that (for example, Peter Greste, journalist, who spent time in a middle east gaol). 

But it won’t be cheap, simple or quick. 

Superficial cleaning only ever gets the “low-hanging fruit” who are hung out to deflect attention from those responsible.

What’s wanted is a thorough deep clean-up of the higher floors. 

That requires turning the low-hanging fruit from being scapegoats to vital links to those ravens and hufflers upstairs who must carry the can.

There must be criminal prosecutions. There must be disciplinary consequences decided by experienced administrators brought in to do the job from outside the ACT public service.

There must be a new management team for ACT Corrections.

The tools to achieve that are:

• An amnesty with a cut-off date against criminal prosecutions. It does not cover disciplinary responses.

• Have the Commonwealth pass legislation to claw back all ACT public service employer contributions to super for anyone convicted of a criminal offence (summary or indictable) arising out of their employment in ACT Corrections. This is to be a time-limited tool; that is, it will have a sunset clause.

The aim is to wash away all the red herrings before the deep cleaning gets under way.

By the way, and only as a point of interest, given that it costs around $300 a day to keep a prisoner in NSW which has useful rehabilitation services, and nearly $550 in the ACT which doesn’t, a Band-Aid fix (which would help to pay the interest bill on Barr’s ever bigger debt legacy) is to ship prisoners interstate.

But nothing will happen unless the Griffins awake. We are the Griffins.

Barr has been the Chief Huffler these past dozen years. The buck stops with him. Barr by name and bar by nature. Everything stops with him. What we want is someone and something to move in the right direction.

Newly minted independent Tom Emerson needs to rethink his agreement to support the Barr government. This will be the test of whether having talked the talk to be elected he will now walk the walk.

Greens’ leader and one time corrections minister Shane Rattenbury must be emboldened to play his part by a strong public sentiment. His party wants more votes in the next federal election. He needs to deliver, to show that he and his party is more than words, words, words.

Let’s give him a spine. Deluge his office with facebook messages and emails.
f  @shanerattenburymla; email:  rattenbury@parliament.act.gov.au

If you’re wondering what to write, then how about: “Put a stop to the daily shame. Make Barr set up a powerful three-member inquiry into the AMC and Corrections management and policies now”.

Shane can share the news with the two independents and wake up the hibernating opposition. We’re paying the salaries of these Rip van Winkles, so let’s see them do something useful.

It’s likely that you have never done this before. Every griffin starts somewhere: send your message. Get your family, your mates, and your work colleagues to do the same. Share this article. You’ll be so glad you did. Go griffins!

Hugh Selby is a former barrister and the legal affairs columnist for CityNews.

Dismal prisons report, it’s time for a probing inquiry