No changes will be made to the independent reporting lines for the office of the ACT Inspector of Correctional Services (OICS) as the outgoing inspector, Neil McAllister, stepped down from his post on Monday at midnight and his replacement, Rebecca Minty, took up the role.
Ms Minty has been the deputy inspector for the past five years and she will begin her new five-year contractual term immediately.
The office has had an uneasy and at times robust relationship with senior executives within the powerful Justice and Community Safety directorate over the years, with Mr McAllister constantly fighting for greater resources beyond the two FTE (full-time equivalent) positions currently provided.
The inspector reports directly to the ACT Assembly and has delivered 15 critical incident reports, as well as several Healthy Prisons assessments, during Mr McAllister's term. In 2021, OICS also assumed an independent overview role of the Bimberi Youth Detention Centre without gaining any additional resources.
Mr McAllister has long argued the funding for OICS should be sourced from the Assembly's operating budget, rather than that of JACS.
Last year at a Senate Estimates hearing, Mr McAllister said the office's full monitoring capabilities were hamstrung by funding. The OICS 2022 Healthy Prisons review also found many of the issues highlighted years before had remain unaddressed.
Just a few weeks ago, retiring ACT magistrate Beth Campbell lamented the "distressing" state of Canberra's prison and its clear failure to "live up to its lofty ambitions".
"In terms of the impact on our monitoring, the challenge we have with low staffing is that when we do a healthy prison review, for example like we are at the Alexander Maconochie Centre, it is incredibly resource-intensive, so we have to put all our attention to that and it means that we are not regularly visiting Bimberi - we simply cannot," he said.
Funding for the OICS role, he said, was originally based around that it would that be investigating one critical incident per year.
"But it has averaged three to four [incidents per year]," he said.
OICS was established in 2017 as a direct result of the systems failures which led to the death in custody of Indigenous inmate Steven Freeman.
An inquiry into Mr Freeman's death, conducted independently by former integrity commissioner Philip Moss, found the broader treatment of Mr Freeman was deficient, marred by a series of failings involving corrections, police, and health authorities.
Mr Freeman had been near-fatally bashed inside his cell roughly a year before his death after he was remanded in custody in the Alexander Maconochie Centre and placed in with sentenced prisoners.
That practice of mixing remand detainees - those who are yet to be convicted of a crime - with sentenced prisoners still continues today because Canberra's jail was built too small to keep the two populations separated.
This has been a long-running breach of corrections legislation yet has never been addressed by successive ministers.
Minister for Corrections Mick Gentleman welcomed Ms Minty to the role and acknowledged the "significant and valued contribution" by Mr McAllister.
"Neil has paved the way for his successors," Mr Gentleman said.
"He has contributed to the ongoing improvement of correctional centres and services in the ACT, having completed numerous reviews into incidents and issues facing our correctional centres."
A former Supreme Court barrister, Ms Minty, has a first class honours degree in law from the ANU and a Masters degrees in law and international and area studies from the Berkeley School of Law at the University of California.
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