Juvenile detention: How one man’s teenage years became a hell that led to murder
AUSTRALIA’S juvenile justice system stands accused of brutalising teens. James Phelps tells the explicit story of how it failed one of them.
NSW
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FLICK. Nothing. Flick. Nothing. Flick ... Finally the flint sparked the butane, sending the flame into the unfurled aluminium foil.
“Nah, not yet,” said the kid holding both the lighter and the sandwich wrapper he’d rescued from the bin. “Wait. I’ll tell ya when.”
The other kid, the one with the sipping straw stuck to his lip, pulled back. “Yeah, sweet,” he said, nodding.
The flame turned the foil black, and the brown blob sitting on top began to bubble.
“Now,” said the cook. “Rip in.”
Sitting on the concrete, a toilet the only thing between him and his newest mate, he leant in and sucked, aiming the end of the straw above the bubbling blob. He heaved into the smoke and inhaled with all his might.
“Hold it,” said the cook. “Hold it in for as long as you can.”
So he did. Not daring to exhale until his face was red-raw from the strain.
Pffffffft. Smoke spewed into the air as his lungs contracted explosively. He waited. Nothing.
“This ain’t doing shit,” he coughed. And then it came. The hit. The oblivion. He smiled, not knowing he would soon be an addict ...
A druggie at the age of 13.
This is the shocking story of how a juvenile detention centre turned a child into a killer. How bashings, brawls and the ever-present badness of a house of horrors made a murderer.
And it all began with a spot of heroin, smuggled into the Minda Juvenile Justice Centre in south-west Sydney by a 16-year-old.
The fear of being bashed, raped or just bloody bored was sucked from Hooker’s body by the burning brown.
“I had a mate from school, and he was in there the same time as me,” Dave Hooker, now 38, said.
“He came up to me one day and asked me if I wanted some ‘uzzles’. I didn’t even know what the f--- it was.
“That was what they called H (heroin) in there.
“No idea why, but that’s what they called it. I don’t know how he got it, but he had it and I was up for anything.”
Hooker, a 13-year-old car thief and Minda’s newest resident, nodded and said, “Sure, why not?" Amid the monsters, most aged 18, more men than boys, sucking back on heroin was better than sitting alone and thinking about when — not if — he would be bashed for his shoes.
“He told me to meet him down by the toilets, so I did," Hooker continued. “He put the shit on the foil and gave me a straw and said, ‘Here you go.’
“He sparked it up for me and I had a toke. I had a smoke afterwards while he was having a go. We went back and forth until it was all gone.”
The fear of being bashed, raped or just bloody bored was sucked from Hooker’s body by the burning brown. Numb, the teenager walked out into the yard. He felt nothing . . . well, until he felt sick.
“I walked out into the yard and started spewing,” Hooker continued. “I had been feeling smashed, awesome. There was nothing in my head. And then I started chucking all over the concrete.”
‘WHERE the f--- is it, Hooker?” yelled the guard, spit spraying as he screamed at the kid.
He had unlocked the heavy metal door and launched into the cell — a 4 metre by 3 metre concrete room.
“Where is what?” Hooker replied as he sprang to attention. “I ain’t got shit, sir.”
The guard looked around. It was difficult to hide anything in a place like this. Scarily similar to any cell in an adult jail, light came in through a small barred window covered in perspex peppered with breeze holes. The door was solid steel with an “observation window” cut into the middle.
The fresh inmate had only a bed, a toilet and a small shelf to keep his belongings ... but it was bare. The only thing Hooker owned in Minda was now between his arse cheeks.
“Someone had slid me a ciggie under the door,” Hooker recalled. “We used to tie shit to cotton and push it across the floor and under the door with a stick or something. On this occasion the officer actually saw it being dragged across the floor.
“He came in to have a go at me and I told him I didn’t have shit. I told him to prove it, but he couldn’t find it because I had it in my arse cheeks. In my ‘safe’ ... ha. That’s what we called it.”
“Bullshit,” the guard had said. “I saw you pull something under the door.”
Hooker shook his head, a giant smirk plastered on his face. Soon the officer had a companion. Another burly beast barged into the room and stood just in front of the open door. “Bend over, you little shit,” said the accuser. “Drop your dacks, c---, and spread your cheeks."
Oh no. “F--- off, you faggot,” Hooker said defiantly. He pointed at the officer guarding the door.
“Go look in your mate’s arse if that’s your thing.”
Whoosh! The guard grabbed the boy — all 45kg of him — and threw him across the room. Bang! Hooker’s tiny frame slammed into the wall, all brick and concrete render.
The guard who’d tossed him rushed forward, as did the other loitering guard.
They both grabbed the kid before hoisting him, with only the slightest effort, two feet into the air.
And then they shook him — up, down, left, right. Hookzy was a ragdoll whose stitches stretched as he was swung, slapped and eventually dropped on his head.
“They came over and threw me around,” Hooker said. “They were trying to make (the tobacco) drop, but I was clenching my arse for the life of me to keep it in there.”
His pants had been ripped off. He was all arse, balls and swinging c---. They shook harder. Whack!
Umphhh! Umphhh! It started with two body blows, but Hooker was punched in the face after he hit the officer again.
“I cracked one of them in the mouth,” Hooker continued. “I wasn’t about to take that shit. I didn’t really care about being caught with the gear, but to be hurled around in the nude by two faggots was just humiliating.”
The officer reeled, surprised by the force of the blow.
Can a 13-year-old really hit that hard? He didn’t stop to consider his question before returning payment — with interest, of course.
“He didn’t like it when I hit him,” Hooker said.
“He was a big unit, probably about 110kg. And he flogged the shit out of me.”
Umphhh! Umphhh! It started with two body blows, but Hooker was punched in the face after he hit the officer again.
“Once I started throwing, the other bloke came in too. They gave me a hiding, smashing my face in before putting me in a headlock, trying to choke me out,” he said. And boy, did it hurt.
“I was a mess. I was sent to the hospital with ‘self-inflicted injuries’. Ha! I had bruises everywhere; my arms, legs, even footprints on the side of my ribs. You could see the shoe marks from where they had stomped me with their boots. My whole neck was bruised from the strangling they gave me.”
His face, too, was swollen and covered in blood. What did the nurse do, aside from treat his wounds? Nothing.
“I couldn’t say anything,” Hooker recalled of the incident. “I just had to cop it. I couldn’t dob, and no one who worked there put the screws in.”
HE recalled one particular bashing he’d received in Minda. His crime? Talking.
“They said they were going to give me a hiding one day because I was talking too much. I told them to f--- off, I would talk whenever I wanted.”
He got belted, of course.
As for Hooker and his brave threat? The 13-year-old and his promise to “upend” the guard who’d left him black and blue but failed to find the tobacco stuffed in his arse?
“He eventually came back to my cell,” Hooker said. “And, yep ... I got him.”
His revenge did not come swiftly, but it did come – with a thunderous crack to the face.
“But they walked me past my wing,” Hooker said. “And that’s when I started getting worried.”
“I waited a while so I could build up a few points for good behaviour,” Hooker continued. “When you had enough points they gave you things, like books and maybe a TV. I ended up with a radio. It had three of those big D batteries in it. So I put them in a sock.”
He waited, waited and waited some more. Eventually Mr ‘‘Drop-Your-Dacks-C---’’ entered his cell. And he copped a half-kilo cannonball to the face. “He came through the door and I swung it at him. I think I broke his jaw.”
Hooker copped another belting for breaking the guard’s jaw with the loaded sock. Is that your best? Another flogging? Big deal. Is that the worst you can do to me? It wasn’t. He was about to learn that there were worse things than bruises and broken bones: “They put me in a segregation cell.”
Crack! The door slammed and he was alone. A 120-watt globe flooded the concrete cell with blinding white light. No bed or blankets. No cupboards or shelves. There wasn’t even a window. Just hard concrete flooded by a sea of unrelenting, blinding light.
“I didn’t think it was too bad at first,” Hooker said. “I knew about segro and knew others who had been thrown in there too.
“I’d heard the stories and they weren’t all that bad. It was uncomfortable and shit, and the food they gave you was terrible, but by law they could only lock you in for 12 hours."
Twelve hours on a cold concrete floor? Piece of piss.
“Or that’s what I thought,” Hooker continued.
Seven hundred and twenty minutes later – 12 hours to the very second – the door opened.
“Let’s go, HOOKER!” the officer boomed, flanked by his obliging buddy.
“You’re out of here.”
Yep. Piece of piss. Over and out.
“But they walked me past my wing,” Hooker said. “And that’s when I started getting worried.”
Worried? No, he should have been terrified. And he would have been, had he known the officers at Minda Juvenile Justice Centre were about to exploit the system — and break the law — by stuffing the now 14-year-old in solitary confinement for a week.
“I got out of juvie,’’ Hooker said. “And I joined up with a bad crew. I was a fully blown addict and I ran drugs in the (Kings) Cross. Eventually I was convicted of murder… robbery in company and assaults too.
“I became addicted to heroin while in juvie. I don’t think that would have happened if I hadn’t been put through the system.”
“I was 17 when I did the murder. When I stabbed a bloke to death.”
Hooker would be convicted of the murder and would not be released from jail until he was in his mid-30s.
He now has a young family, and has moved well away from where he grew up. He has genuinely turned his back on crime.
He is one of the rare reformers and somebody this author is happy to call a friend.
So did the NSW Juvenile Justice system make this murderer? Did Minda and Kariong turn this one-time 13-year-old car thief into a killer?
“I became addicted to heroin while in juvie. I don’t think that would have happened if I hadn’t been put through the system. And my murder, and my major crimes, were a result of me being an addict,’’ he said.
So did juvie make him a criminal? “No”. Did juvie make him a drug addict? “Yes”.
And did juvie make him a murderer? “I would have to say it did,’’ Hooker said.
“Or, at the very least, the system has to cop some of the blame.’’
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