Abominable, unconscionable behaviour from the department - but it was easy to see why they were so desperate to keep the man locked a long way away from a camera. He was terrific talent, funny, mischievous and whip-smart - probably the nation's finest jailhouse lawyer. He had so much to say, all of it nightmarishly bad for Corrections.
Gangs run the prisons. Cigarettes are everywhere. Fight clubs pre-dated Serco. Every minute another revelation. And, because Owen is such a skilled interviewer, we learned a hell of a lot. She wouldn't let him evade, but would let him speak. Combine that with the extraordinary - by current standards - length of the piece and you had easily the most absorbing television interview of the year to date.
Afterwards she spoke to Bill English for nearly a quarter of an hour, talking about housing policy and Auckland local body politics with a level of detail and dispassion it's been hard to find lately. The show makes a virtue of its off-peak timeslot, doing everything you're not supposed to do in modern television and showing why those who remember the 70s and 80s might occasionally be right in their nostalgia for the good old days.
These lengthy interviews don't always work - in the lead-up to the 2014 election Steven Joyce and Grant Robertson bickered cynically throughout - but when they do they're incredibly valuable.
The show closes with a panel discussion running over an ad break, with three smart people discussing something they know and care about like adults. This week it was Hive News' Bernard Hickey, Fairfax political ed Tracy Watkins and Otago University law professor Andrew Geddis. All three participated in sober, non-partisan analysis of recent political events, and were given adequate time to put forth their views.
All this makes The Nation sound like it might be ... dull? The kind of television people who claim not to own televisions claim to want. Only, it's not. Because it's thoughtfully produced, and those long interviews are interspersed with not only Jeremy Corbett and Paul Ego's fast and silly "Politics in 60 Seconds", but also five minutes of Paddy Gower going mad in the Southern USA.
The current US Republican race is Gower's wet dream of politics - mad, bad, dangerous and deranged. His report told us nothing more than that he was having the time of his life in the midst of that apocalyptic chaos, and functioned as seasoning for the meaty policy and allegation.
The Nation's not for everyone by any means. But if you enjoy the theatre of politics in this country, and think that occasionally its practitioners can meaningfully impact our lives, then the old-fashioned chat of The Nation is appointment viewing. Even if that appointment is at a very strange time.
