Mid North Coast Correctional Centre: Department fined $600k over prison officer's torture

A government department has been convicted and fined for safety failures that resulted in a prison officer suffering brutal injuries during a six-hour ambush and siege.

Two correctional officers, who cannot be legally named, were attacked by a pair of prisoners at the Mid North Coast Correctional Centre near Kempsey on December 19, 2020.

While one of the officers escaped with several stab wounds, the other man was tied up in the officers’ station with a skipping rope before being beaten, stabbed with a shiv and chemically burned by a hospital-grade disinfectant, Fincol.

It took six hours for the hostage situation to be resolved, ending when negotiators agreed to consider the two inmates for an opioid injection program.

The state Department of Communities and Justice, which runs Corrective Services NSW, pleaded guilty in October to breaches of the Work Health and Safety Act, admitting policy failures led to the violent incident.

On Friday, NSW District Court Judge Wendy Strathdee convicted the state entity, ordering it pay a $600,000 fine for breaches of workplace health and safety law.

These breaches included guards not being required to enter and exit the officers’ station through an airlock, which would isolate them from inmates, and a failure to ensure chemicals like Fincol were securely stored.

The gravity of the risk was known to the NSW government and there were straightforward steps that could have been taken to minimise the potential for harm, the judge said.

The contravention was an “objectively serious example of an offence of this kind,” she found.

Judge Strathdee acknowledged the great suffering of the prison officer who was tied up and tortured, adding the man had attended work that day to do a job he thought would make a difference.

“To my mind, here was a man devoted to his community and those with whom he worked, whose life has been irreparably damaged,” she said.

“He suffers an overwhelming sense of betrayal as everything he worked for has been taken away from him.”

The aggravating factors for the workplace health and safety breach included the “brutal” and “depraved” injuries experienced by the officer over the six-hour period, the judge said.

After the ambush, Corrective Services NSW implemented some additional safety protocols, including for the secure storage of hazardous chemicals and prison contraband like hand-made weapons.

These improvements, as well as remorse shown by Corrective Services NSW through its early guilty plea, were taken as mitigating factors by the court.

Half of the $600,000 fine will go to SafeWork NSW for prosecuting the case.

The government has also been ordered to pay SafeWork’s legal costs.