A look at a key question at the heart of WA’s youth justice problem – and the government’s response to it
WARNING: This story contains the name and image of an Indigenous person who has died.
Over the course of about a month of hearings, the secrets of WA’s long-troubled youth justice system have been dragged into the light.
Those watching have seen a picture of dysfunction, chaos and poor planning for a decade or more emerge, factors which culminated in the death of 16-year-old Cleveland Dodd last year – the first the state has recorded in juvenile detention.
In a few months’ time, after a fourth round of hearings in December, Coroner Philip Urquhart will use everything gathered in the most forensic examination of WA’s youth justice system ever undertaken to make a series of recommendations.
The hope is that those ideas will chart a path forward which, at a bare minimum, will prevent a third death in custody.
But outside of Courtroom 51 there are already signs the government is charting its own path, at odds with the expert evidence the inquest heard this week.
‘Behaviour is communication’
The core of the conflict is a simple question with a less simple answer: why do some young people behave badly?
Mental health nurse David Etherington has a better understanding than most, having told the inquest of his experiences walking through Banksia Hill and Unit 18 and trying to work out how the young people detained in there, including Cleveland, tick.
The short answer, he explained, was they are “needs driven”.
“They need [their] needs to be met. That’s what they expect. When that doesn’t happen they accelerate their behaviours,” Mr Etherington said, alluding to things like self-harm and destroying property.
“If their needs are met, everything de-escalates.”
Those needs can be everything from food and water to friendship.
A similar view was expressed by Marshall Watson, a Noongar man who the inquest was told is one of about 20 Aboriginal psychiatrists in the nation and worked at Banksia Hill between 2010 and 2014.
“All behaviour is communication that’s emotionally-based,” Dr Watson said.
“Don’t take what they do at face value … try and understand them a bit more.”
He added that a punitive, rather than therapeutic approach, would only make things worse “because you’re not actually treating the underlying issue”.
Effectively, he says, children and teenagers, especially these ones, sometimes aren’t entirely in control of their behaviour – their behaviour is a consequence of their environment.
‘It’s a failure of their behaviour’: Papalia
The man in charge of the system has a different view to those experts though.
After saying the inquest was the reason he couldn’t comment on former Corrective Services boss Mike Reynolds’s characterisation of him as “harebrained” and chaotic, Corrective Services Minister Paul Papalia addressed at length other issues discussed at the inquest, including the current treatment of young people in Unit 18.
Coroner Philip Urquhart this week heard those at Banksia Hill can get up to 10 hours a day out of their cells, while at Unit 18 – which houses a group the minister describes as “far more complex, challenging and often violent” – can get eight at most.
“The reason that out of cell hours are lower is because of the cohort and their behaviour,” Mr Papalia said.
“It’s a failure of their behaviour.”
Investment reaps ‘great rewards’
That nuanced issue of how much control young people have over their behaviour, and how much is heavily influenced by external factors, lies at the heart of how a youth justice system is run.
Because while the crisis which saw some young people spend up to 24 hours a day in their cells is over, experts believe the fundamentals underpinning detention, and the results they produce in recidivism and broken lives, have not changed.
“We need a government that is able to have the confidence to say, yes, we’re going to invest in this because it will reap great rewards,” Merinda March, the chief executive of Hope Community Services, said.
National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds said: “What we need is the leaders to be courageous enough to say we have misunderstood the problems that we are trying to solve”.
Either way, a price is paid
Doing that requires some difficult political conversations.
One exchange during the inquest sheds light on why that hasn’t happened.
Dr Angela Cooney, who has helped run Banksia Hill since 2021 and is currently acting as the assistant corrective services commissioner for young people, told the inquest “significant change” was needed, and that not everyone in the system knew what the masses of academic research showed.
She was taken to evidence that during one week towards the end of Cleveland’s life, he spent just under two hours out of his cell across a seven-day period. On three of those days he did not leave his cell at all.
“If the Department of Justice told the Western Australian community that … there’d be outrage wouldn’t there?” counsel assisting the coroner Anthony Crocker asked.
“I would hope so, yes,” Dr Cooney replied.
Similar information has been highlighted for years now, but the outrage Dr Cooney, and others, hope for hasn’t followed.
Most people simply aren’t that interested in what’s happening behind bars.
Our politicians are elected to represent us and make tough choices for the greater good.
Without having nuanced conversations, politicians are left choosing between what’s politically popular and what the expert evidence shows.
Someone pays the price either way. The difference is if it’s a politician, or vulnerable young people.
Contact us
Please provide a brief description of your claim.
