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Corrections Department chief executive Barry Matthews has offered the oddest of angles on the escape from prison last week of axe murderer John Frederick Ericson. He told Parliament's law and order select committee that this was not as dangerous as might be imagined because most killers were "unremarkable
people". Indeed, he did not believe Ericson intended to harm any members of the public. As reassurances go, it was hardly convincing. The more so because when Ericson was apprehended, he was carrying an improvised knife.
On one level, Mr Matthews may be right. If psychopathic serial killers are set aside, murder is usually a crime of passion. People who commit murder tend not to kill again. As much was reinforced by Joan M. Cheever, whose 2006 book Back from the Dead examined the subsequent activity of men who walked off death row in the United States in 1972 when the death penalty briefly disappeared.
In a wider context, however, this has little relevance. Playing down the danger posed by murderers places Mr Matthews at cross-purposes with both the police and the court system. Ericson was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering his wife by striking her repeatedly on the back of the head with a tomahawk while she was sleeping. Implicit in that judgment was his removal from any situation that could imperil the public. Courts make no distinction on the basis that murderers are unlikely to kill again.
Ericson, however, was able to simply walk away from an unsupervised work party outside Wellington Prison. Speaking in Parliament on behalf of the Corrections Minister, Cabinet minister Annette King sought to excuse this by saying research showed reoffending was less likely to occur when prisoners were able to reconnect with society before their release. That may be so but, clearly, Correction's risk analysis misfired in a way that must have wider implications. Annette King conceded as much when she noted the process for classifying prisoners might have to be looked at.
In such circumstances, the police must pick up the pieces. They treated Ericson as a very dangerous person, mounted a large-scale manhunt involving Army helicopters and tracker dogs, and captured him 26 hours after his escape. Mr Matthews was in no mood to offer congratulations, however. Pursuing his line that Ericson posed no great danger to public safety, he observed that Corrections had a "different view of things" from the police because they dealt with murderers daily. It hardly needs saying which approach offers more comfort.
Finally, Mr Matthews could not resist a tilt at the media. They, he said, were to blame for the impression that Corrections did not take Ericson's escape seriously. This argument would be extremely difficult to sustain, given Mr Matthews' eagerness to stress that murderers were unlikely to reoffend. Indeed, it merely added grist to the view expounded by National MP Simon Power that the department was returning to a culture of refusing to take responsibility when things went wrong.
Much, of course, has gone wrong in the past year or two. Seventeen-year-old Liam Ashley's death in the back of a prison van, the prelude to a damning Chief Ombudsman's report, and the Graeme Burton case are just the leading items on a long list of blunders and controversies. Any lingering public confidence can only have been further diminished by the reaction to Ericson's escape. If Mr Matthews wishes to address that, he should stop looking for excuses in situations when none will suffice.
