Townsville Correctional Centre: Whistleblower hits out at TCC management
Employee morale has allegedly reached critically low levels creating an unsafe work environment at Townsville Correctional Centre, a whistleblower warns.
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Employee morale has allegedly reached critically low levels creating an unsafe work environment at Townsville Correctional Centre, a whistleblower has warned.
The prison has long faced accusations of a poor workplace culture as well as two previous senior managers having been forced out amid accusations of inappropriate relationships.
“The morale and work culture within the centre is getting to a critical point where it is now becoming dangerous for the individuals who work there,” a custodial correctional officer said.
“We have tried and tried and tried to reason with management as much as we can to try and see some kind of change but nothing’s happening.”
Another source said people were so “disconnected” they were not coming to work, with many choosing to call in sick for their shifts.
The prison has come under fire from corrective services staff multiple times in the past two years due to poor management of staff morale, with many choosing to leave the centre.
Sources told this masthead that multiple staff had PTSD from the job and it was not taken seriously by management.
The officer said management was “more interested in saving face” than addressing issues within TCC.
They said the already high staff turnover had been compounded by the alleged abuse of the Tactical Response Group, a voluntary unit that provided an emergency response to critical or dangerous incidents within the prison.
The source said the unit comprised 26 members six months ago, a figure that had been reduced to just 11.
They alleged that management had been abusing the unit to fill staff shortages, labelling it a “brazen move outside of its actual purpose and after stating it would never be used for this reason”.
A Queensland Correction Services spokeswoman said the leadership of the prison had its support.
The spokeswoman said QCS had the “confidence in leadership” at the correctional centre who “work in a complex and difficult environment in the interests of community safety for all Queenslanders”.
The whistleblower said the TRG job already took a “heavy toll on its responders”.
Another source backed up the claims, saying this has happened “regularly”.
“TRG are one of three resources that are on call for an emergency,” the source said.
Another source said very few corrections officers were signing up to be part of TRG.
Late last year, prison officers revealed they were receiving multiple text messages, some less than an hour before shifts started, with calls for workers.
One morning, eight messages were sent out before 8.30am.
“The … of the on-call system for staff shortages is also greatly reducing the centre’s capacity for an emergency response should a major disturbance arise,” the source said.
The whistleblower said dealing with prisoners on a day-to-day basis was not the hard part of the job.
“That’s straightforward, it’s the culture within the centre and divide between ground-line staff and management is something I’ve never witnessed before,” he said.
“Our union does nothing for us, they achieve nothing, we’re the only government agency that haven’t received the cost-of-living allowance that every other government agency has received, the list goes on.”
Another source said the prison was regularly understaffed, with seven staff down last Saturday night.
Prison sources said staff had approached management on multiple occasions in an attempt to have supervisor meetings for operational decisions, but the meetings never eventuated.
They say there hasn’t been a town-hall meeting with staff to address issues in two months.
The QCS spokeswoman said it would not be “fair” to workers to respond to “unsourced and unsubstantiated allegations” about staffing.
“QCS has well-established, well-known internal and external channels through which concerns can be raised and addressed in a timely and meaningful manner,” the spokeswoman said.
“We encourage anyone with evidence to support these allegations to use the appropriate channels to ensure they are addressed productively.”
She said TCC continued to “meet performance requirements over the past years, even with increasing prisoner numbers and complexity”.
“TCC has undergone a significant cultural transformation since an independent workplace review in 2020,” she said.
“Every officer at TCC had the opportunity to meet privately with the investigator to raise any concerns they may have had, and all recommendations of the review were accepted and implemented.”
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