JAIL staff who are rightly concerned about the impact of pending staff cuts on their own safety and the safety of the inmates they protect deserve better from their employer than some rubbery mathematics.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Corrective Services NSW is happy to concede that a new benchmarking formula to be applied across the state’s prisons will result in staffing changes across the board.
But the department seems less willing to admit that, in this case, change is simply bureaucratic speak for cuts.
Indeed, when the Western Advocate sought the department’s response to suggestions the new staffing formula would mean 21 fewer prison officers at Bathurst and a total of 40 fewer across the region’s four jails, we were told that staff numbers were actually on the way up.
In a written response, a department spokesperson said: “Benchmarking will result in staffing changes at each of the centres, however about 68 new jobs will be created. New positions will be created by the $110 million, major expansion at Bathurst and an increase in reducing reoffending programs at all four centres.”
That all sounds good, but the numbers do not stand up to closer analysis.
When plans to open 250 new maximum security beds at Bathurst were announced, we were told the development would create 55 new positions.
By the department’s own figures, then, the benchmarking must create 13 new jobs across the region to bring us to the 68 quoted by their spokesperson.
So if 40 jobs are lost – as claimed by the union and not refuted by the department – then the region will see a net loss of 27 jail jobs at a time when the prison population is booming.
The department’s response is a deliberate fudging of the figures that will do nothing to make prisons safer or more effective.
Prison staff already face one of the most demanding jobs in our society and reducing staff-to-inmate ratios can only be a recipe for disaster.
The union says the incident rate at NSW jails is already at a record high and it’s hard to see how cutting staff numbers might improve the situation.
But benchmarking, we’re told, “will enable [the department] for the first time to determine if individual prisons are meeting performance targets”.
It must all seem so easy from a high-rise office in the centre of Sydney.
