Darroch Ball
Leader
Sensible Sentencing Trust
Kelvin Davis launches a plan to curb increasing assaults on prison guards and then says assaults on prison guards aren’t increasing.
In what seems to be one of the most blatant examples of a minister being out of touch with his frontline workers, the Minister of Corrections has said that the reason why the statistics show a large increase in assaults on prison officers is only because “all incidents are now reported”.
Not because they are getting assaulted more – just because all incidents are now being reported.
He might want to talk to his frontline staff – because I have. And they are pulling their hair out with frustration because the minister refuses to listen.
They feel they have been ignored for the past five years while prisoners are attacking them and are getting more and more violent.
A couple of weeks ago the president of the Corrections Association, Floyd Du Plessis, wrote a letter to the chief executive in response to initiatives against the increasing violence being experienced from prisoners.
Attached to the letter were the latest assault figures which show a massive increase in violence and assaults over the past few years. The frontline is clearly fed up with the lack of action being taken to keep them safe.
In the letter, Du Plessis states that recruitment and retention is an ‘abject failure’, ‘staff are leaving in droves’ and leadership ‘is the biggest failure of your department’.
He goes on to say, ‘We’re not prepared to continue enduring endless, pointless meetings with people who have no idea of the reality of what we do or the challenges we face.’
Number of assaults in 2017 = 436. Number of workdays lost 2017 = 706
Number of assaults in 2022 = 909. Number of workdays lost 2020 = 6257
The only question any decent journalist needs to ask the minister is: If it’s only because all incidents are now being reported, then why has there been an exponential increase in the number of workdays missed due to the assaults?
Either the staff are lying, or they are being assaulted to such a serious degree that they are having to take time off work because of it.
What is most astonishing about Davis saying assaults weren’t increasing, is the fact that, exactly a year earlier, to the day, he announced he had “just signed off on an action plan to address prison assaults…”
So which one is it?
Are the frontline officers lying about the increase in violence, complaining about nothing and it’s just because of the reporting? Or is it because assaults are actually increasing, have been increasing for years and the minister even needed to announce a ‘plan’ to address the problem?
Maybe it’s just because the minister is refusing to listen to the frontline and refusing to acknowledge that what he has been doing for the past five years is simply not working.
The Corrections Association have told me they have had enough.
And it will be coming to a head very soon.