Horrifying new footage aired on the ABC shows prison officers dragging a boy to the ground and restraining him, twisting his legs behind him and sitting on top of him, holding him down. The boy was in solitary confinement in detention in Western Australia’s only juvenile prison, Banksia Hill.
Six years after the ABC’s Four Corners first exposed the use of spit hoods and tear-gassing of juvenile inmates in the Northern Territory’s Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, serious allegations of excessive force on child detainees continue.
WA’s justice department has defended the restraint as a “last resort” despite a royal commission — at least into the Don Dale centre — which found the use of body weight while an inmate was in this prone position posed a serious risk of injury or death. The practice, in which detainees are “folded up” or “hogtied”, is so risky that it has been banned in Queensland youth detention centres.
The new footage comes after years of repeated calls to raise Australia’s age of criminal culpability from 10 to 14 years, phase out inhumane methods of restraint, cease subjecting children to solitary confinement, and ultimately shut down these centres.
Banksia Hill holds 10-to-17-year-olds, including those sentenced serving time, convicted awaiting sentencing, and youth arrested awaiting bail or trial. Annually 600 young people are detained there. Earlier this year, 17 of Banksia Hill’s most “problem” children were relocated to the maximum-security adult Casuarina Prison.
It’s estimated that across Australia, 600 children under the age of 13 are locked up, with thousands more processed through the criminal justice system. These high rates combined with well-documented mistreatment of juveniles within the justice system are deemed out of step with UN human rights conventions that Australia is a party to.
Last month, Australia failed to meet obligations when it blocked UN officials access to its prisons (juvenile and adult).
Transparency is an ongoing issue — one of the boy’s family members told the ABC she wants the footage to be released to expose how detainees are treated: “I want them to remember this is a young boy, not a man. A kid.”
Some days it is simply shameful to be an Australian. This footage makes today such a day.
Childhood malnutrition, hearing loss, undiagnosed eyesight issues and all the rest of it caused by poverty – poverty caused by society; alcohol, drugs, smoking; domestic violence; a child’s natural anger at unfairly being the victim of all this; absence of control and restraint at home and school and on the street. History itself. We can build ten thousand cells and fill them all to only make the problem worse at every generation, instead of seeing and understanding the issues, all of which are caused by us and which we, collectively, must repair. Nothing new, then.
I grew up in a lower socio-economic household that had fallen on hard times but were blue collar. Alcohol, drugs, smoking and dv are not restricted to lower socio-economic households and are certainly not automatically present in these households. I agree they may be more prevalent but they do not have to be endemic to lower socio-economic households neither does “anger” at the “unfairness”. It is what it is.
Most of the people that I grew up with went on to bigger and better things despite “poverty”. Amazing what discipline, a work ethic and a drive to improve your situation in life can do.
oh bull.
Just because you landed on your feet, doesn’t mean everyone else is lucky, yes lucky enough to avoid trouble. Perhaps the missing variable is the colour of your skin.
Are you trying to parody the Monty Python ‘Four Yorkshiremen‘ skit?
Just tired of bleeding hearts with no experience with criminals. Always sympathy for criminals but not their victims.
As another subscriber put it “if one of your own precious little Whitey brats was confronted by an iced-up ‘Steve’ in your privileged Whitey suburbs, I’ll just bet you’d be calling for Mr Plod to come swinging the baton so fast and so loudly that even your smug bubble of delusion would pop”.
Exactly !
Those who fall behind, should be left behind !
Yes, all of those things plus FASD, and transgenerational trauma, and ongoing traumatic events caused by racism and poverty. It’s a bloody disgrace and treating those children with brutality is the least helpful thing imaginable.
Caused by ‘racism and poverty’. Alternatively, by ‘parents succumbing to alcoholism, addiction and inflicting violence on their own kids’.
Lots of Blak parents manage to NOT succumb to these childhood-destroying things, by the way. Lots of Blak Australians manage to transcend ‘racism and poverty’ and ‘trans generational trauma’, just fine. Lots of other disadvantaged Australians do, too.
Our aim should be to maximise the number who do, not make endless excuses for those who don’t even try. Or think they even need to.
Some of these children are on remand. That is, they have been convicted of no crime.
That does not excuse attacking someone or resisting restraint when the child has been violent.
An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.
Prison guards have a right to go home to their families at night. How many other jobs do you atomatically assume you could be brutally attacked by your “clients”?
No doubt the risk of assault will be a key reason staff are resigning at problematic rates, leaving juvie understaffed and the Blak kids there even more vulnerable.
Because of the circumstances these kids are born into some of them are truly hard cases and present real problems to the justice system. Once they get to that stage it is a huge effort to fix the damage.
Ultimately we need to fix the environments they are born into but in the current instances we also need to look at the interactions they have with the police, the courts and the prison system. At the moment those interactions are not the best, to put it mildly.