NSW Corrective Services employees are subject to intolerable behaviour

In NSW, the prison system doesn’t get much attention in public debate. The wider community doesn’t know, or perhaps care much about jails.

That’s partly because they are, by their nature, secretive and closed off. It’s also because they house people whose actions the community abhors. With so much injustice in the world, there’s scarce sympathy to spare for people who’ve caused their own problems.

All this means the NSW prison system is subject to little external scrutiny.

And yet Corrective Services NSW is a government organisation, responsible for 12,000-odd incarcerated people and a large workforce.

Some would describe it as a paramilitary arm of the state; some guards carry guns and there are sniffer dogs, riot response and hostage rescue teams.

It should, like all government departments – and perhaps more than most – be setting a high standard for the treatment of its staff and of those for whom it has a duty of care.

On both those fronts, NSW Corrective Services, a branch of the Department of Communities and Justice, has failed.

The Sun-Herald today reveals a deeply embedded culture of sexual harassment of female staff within Corrective Services, involving behaviour that would never be tolerated in corporate Australia. Women who are simply trying to do their job in a difficult environment have been crudely and directly propositioned for sex by their superiors.

Many feared for their physical safety and evidence shows that fear has often been justified.

They also said they were often too afraid of retribution, of being labelled a “dog” by their bosses, to report sexual misconduct. Some weren’t even aware that this kind of behaviour was unacceptable; they hadn’t been given training. Some did report it and nothing happened.

This has been going on for years and Corrective Services NSW knew about it.

Past and present female employees at Corrective Services NSW have been emboldened to speak up because of a Special Commission of Inquiry into the crimes of Wayne Astill, a former prison guard who has been convicted of raping 14 female inmates over five years (he is appealing against his convictions).

The Astill report, released earlier this year, was scathing of Corrective Services and said, despite rumour and evidence that Astill was abusing inmates, jail management failed to act and even tried to suppress it. Staff figured reporting was pointless and inmates knew they would not be believed.

“You’ll have more trouble with blue [guards] than green [inmates],” one woman was told when she began the job, she revealed.

In a submission to the inquiry, CSNSW identified 14 sites in which there had been problem levels of staff-on-staff sexual misconduct. In 2022 it commissioned the Seymour Review of a central west prison where an employee was found to have harassed staff. It refuses to release the results.

But we do know, from snippets in the Astill report, that the Seymour Review was scathing, too, and that staff described the working culture as toxic, stressful, unprofessional, abusive, belittling and a boys club and said management ignored, or even condoned, inappropriate conduct.

And yet Corrective Services still failed to implement system-wide policies in place to address the problem.

In the six months to March, SafeWork, the workplace safety watchdog, had to issue six improvement notices to CSNSW, saying workers had been exposed to risk due to the lack of harassment training, or systems to manage harassment reports, or the failure to acknowledge that harassment could occur off-site.

This is a situation that should horrify any NSW government. These are government employees, forced to work in a kind of harassment wild west, exposed to behaviour that has long been unacceptable anywhere in the wider community.

And yet when The Sun-Herald asked questions of Corrections Minister Anoulack Chanthivong he did not provide any comment.

Meanwhile, the NSW Inspector of Custodial Services last month recommended the closure of a section of Cessnock prison because it didn’t meet NSWCS’s objective of keeping people in humane living conditions.

Jails aren’t pleasant places. But those who work in them and are forced to live in them should at least be safe from abuses of power. The government has failed on that front for both staff and inmates. It must take action, urgently and publicly.