Lazy bureaucrats

Andrew Tettenborn has an interesting CAPX piece on a remarkable example of bureaucratic sloth in the prison system.

Lazy bureaucrats are threatening the rule of law

If you want a serious example of broken Britain that doesn’t neatly fit the Left’s culture of blaming everything on populism and underfunding, look no further than what happened at Wandsworth prison earlier this year, as described in a High Court judgment reported last week.

On a Tuesday morning, Westminster magistrates sentenced a Korean gentleman, Bumju Kim, to ten weeks for assault. Since he had already spent more than that on remand, he should have been set free. Instead he was bundled straight back on the bus to HMP Wandsworth. Wandsworth that evening realised something was wrong, but calmly told Mr Kim that even if it was, nothing could be done for a couple of days. Meanwhile, Mr Kim would just have to stay unlawfully cooped up in a stinking prison.

The whole piece is well worth reading, both as an example of bureaucratic sloth and because of the not unfamiliar culture which allowed it.

At about 2:30 on Wednesday morning, a High Court judge issued a writ of habeas corpus addressed to the Governor herself, commanding her either to release Mr Kim or bring him before him by 11am next day. The lawyer rang the prison early next morning, presumably with this news, but the receptionist refused to put him through to either the Duty Governor or the Offender Management Unit. Nor was Mr Kim brought before the court by 11 (though he was released a little later). Ordered by a furious judge to file evidence within seven days explaining her plain disobedience to a habeas corpus writ, the Governor did nothing. She finally responded some days later after a threat to sentence her for contempt of court…

The judge himself hit the nail on the head. The Governor of Wandsworth seemed, he said, to have regarded a court order as not so much an order but a target: as something to be slotted in to the other matters of routine and performed as and when possible. That’s bad enough with orders addressed to private litigants to do this or that. With orders concerning the liberty of the subject it is, as the judge made clear, unforgivable.