The Department of Corrections blames the size of the organisation and the busy nature of prisons for misconduct allegations being missed.
Nine staff members have been suspended at Rimutaka Prison in Upper Hutt after an investigation, called Operation Portia, into corruption at the jail discovered other code of conduct breaches including bringing contraband into the prison and accessing information on prisoners. The recent suspensions were not believed to be directly linked to Operation Portia.
Corrections chief custodial officer Neil Beales told AM co-host Melissa Chan-Green the nine staff members are from a range of grades from officers to senior management and have been put on special leave.
"Prisons are very busy places, as you know. Rimutaka is one of our biggest ones," Beales said. "We have a high number of staff in there, a high number of interactions every single day so there are going to be things that happen that we may not become immediately aware of."
He said there is a range of ways staff can report issues, including through an integrity team.
But these allegations were not picked up internally.
"Remember these are allegations at this point, they are yet to be proven and we are also yet to understand the depth of the allegations," Beale said.
Beales said the Department of Corrections is a big organisation with 10,000 staff and mistakes can happen.
"Things on occasion are going to go wrong, people are going to make mistakes, whether honestly or not," Beales said.
"But I want to say this, that the vast majority of staff working in corrections are hardworking, fine, upstanding New Zealand citizens who carry a lot of integrity because we need them to do that in order to do the job properly.
"Where we find that people have overstepped that mark and they are not meeting the standards that we demand then we have processes that we will deal with them and we are doing so now."
He said he is not aware of any further staff members or prisons related to these allegations.
