Increasingly dispirited staff see issues mount in juvenile detention centre
They call it the Hall of Broken Dreams: a modest office block inside the Banksia Hill juvenile prison in Perth’s southeast.
They call it the Hall of Broken Dreams: the modest office block inside the Banksia Hill juvenile prison in Perth’s southeast where generations of administrators and staff have battled policy, competency and the intractable challenge of managing Western Australia’s most difficult children with an increasingly diminishing amount of success.
The nickname for the admin block is just one example of the gallows humour that has developed among the staff at Banksia Hill, who have grown increasingly dispirited as the issues inside the centre continue to mount.
Those problems boiled over on New Year’s Eve, when a group of inmates broke into the demountable office that contained the prison’s riot gear, grabbed the equipment and then set fire to the building and the nearby education centre. Some 22 of the juveniles then climbed on top of one of the prison fences and refused to get back down until they had watched the midnight fireworks over Perth.
Former Banksia Hill staff, WA’s inspector of custodial services, child psychologists and justice advocates this week have all lamented the current state of Banksia Hill, the only juvenile detention facility in the state.
The Weekend Australian has spoken to multiple former Banksia Hill employees who say that conditions there have been rapidly deteriorating for years. While those staff, who spoke on condition of anonymity, criticise the direction of the facility in recent years, there is also a level of sympathy for those trying to run Banksia Hill out of the Hall of Broken Dreams.
“That’s what they call the admin block,” one former staffer said. “Whenever we’d get a new superintendent, you’d just think ‘who did you piss off or what did they actually tell you to get you to take this job?’.”
Inadequate staffing
Those workers said staff morale was terrible and had driven high turnover, especially among long-serving employees.
The Department of Justice on Friday confirmed there had been 43 resignations at Banksia Hill in 2021 and another 54 in 2022. Incentive payments of $2500 have been introduced for trainees who complete training programs and another $2500 will be payable to youth custodial officers at the end of this financial year.
The department said 81 new officers started last year and another 40 probationary staff are expected to join when they complete training courses this year. The former staff say there is now an increased reliance on rookie guards who are often not much older than the juveniles themselves and who struggle to command respect.
Inadequate staffing has long been a persistent issue. While WA Corrective Services Minister Bill Johnston said there was plenty of staff on the night of the riot, one former worker said there had been as few as four people working the night shift at times recently.
Low staffing levels have driven up the amount of time that juveniles spend locked in their cells. Those lockdowns – including one boy enduring 79 days of solitary confinement – were described as illegal by Perth Children’s Court president Hylton Quail. There has also been criticism of the practice of moving the most difficult Banksia Hill detainees to a dedicated unit inside the adult Casuarina jail.
Speaking after the riot this week, Mr Johnston repeatedly and pointedly noted that the 66 detainees within Banksia Hill were only there because the Children’s Court had decided that was the only appropriate place for them.
“These are a small number of people that the Children’s Court say need to be kept in detention,” the minister said. “The Children’s Court has determined that those 66 young offenders should be in detention at Christmas, and not with their families at Christmas.”
The fence the rioters watched the fireworks display from is one of the many that have been added to Banksia Hill in recent years in a fruitless effort to hold back the tide of dysfunction within the centre.
Like an adult prison
The facility was originally built as an open-plan campus, but more and more fences have been added over the years to the point where WA’s Inspector of Custodial Services, Eamon Ryan – who describes it as the only facility he loses sleep over – said Banksia Hill was all but indistinguishable from a prison.
“When Banksia was first opened, it was an open-style campus, it looked like a school,” he said. “Then over the years with difficult cohorts they’ve hardened the infrastructure with fencing and it looks like an adult prison.”
The fences, former staff say, have done nothing to diminish the frequency of incidents within Banksia Hill. The installation a few years ago of “unclimbable” fences only served as a challenge to the boys, setting off a contest to see who could be the first to scale it.
The images of so many boys sitting on the circular cowling on top of the fence on New Year’s Eve may have shocked the public, but boys running along the cowling is such a common sight at Banksia Hill that the fence is nicknamed “the silver highway” by staff.
“It’s not uncommon for the kids to run off and climb the fence and sit up there for a couple of hours,” Mr Ryan said. “That’s the sad reality of juvenile detention.”
Neurological disease
Perhaps the most fundamental and difficult challenge within Banksia Hill is the prevalence of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) and other neurological impairments among detainees.
A landmark study from 2017 found that two-thirds of detainees had some form of neurological disability, including around one-third who had FASD.
FASD, which is untreatable, reflects itself in poor impulse control and an inability to predict consequences or learn from mistakes.
There were hopes within Banksia Hill that those findings would trigger changes for the better, but instead, the former staff say, there has just been more of the same.
Many within the system trace the roots of Banksia Hill’s dysfunction back to the 2012 decision to close Rangeview, a juvenile remand facility in the Perth suburb of Murdoch.
Following Rangeview’s closure, Banksia Hill is home not only to male juveniles from Perth who have been sentenced but also to adults who were juveniles when they began their sentences, following a change to the practice that saw them transferred to adult prison upon turning 18.
Children on remand and female juveniles are also housed at Banksia Hill, as well as young offenders brought down from the Pilbara and Kimberley.
All those cohorts, the former staffers say, have different needs and all are worse off from being so close to the other groups.
One former staffer said the increased mingling of Pilbara and Kimberley juveniles with Perth detainees at Banksia Hill had helped drive the crime waves that had become increasingly acute in those regions.
Disruptive behaviour
For many detainees, Banksia is the only part of Perth they’ve seen. “There’s nowhere in the world where children are incarcerated so far from home,” one staffer said.
Similarly, thee staffers said the behaviours learned inside Banksia Hill had carried over into the adult prisons as those former detainees found themselves back behind bars. A recent riot inside Casuarina, they said, was led by a group of former Banksia Hill detainees.
Mr Ryan believes the key next step is the re-establishment of a dedicated juvenile remand centre.
“Ultimately, even though the population is very low at the moment, having only one centre just doesn’t work,” he said.
“I’ve said that time and again (and) many, many others have said that time and again.”
Remand kids were not the only source of disruptive behaviour, he said, but having them mixed in with the sentenced detainees was unhelpful.
“If you’ve got a kid and they’re only in for four or five weeks before you can find a suitable place for them to stay and they get bail, there’s not much you can do with them by way of longer-term engagement with them in education and training,” he said.
“Whereas kids who are sentenced, they might get six or 12 months in detention. You’ve got them for a longer time, you can settle them, you can get them involved in education, you can start to build those foundations and building blocks. But if every day there are kids up on the roof and there’s mayhem, everyone gets locked in and everything stops.”
To date, Mr Johnston and WA Premier Mark McGowan have been unapologetic about the state of Banksia Hill. They have emphasised the need to ensure the community is protected and that repeat offenders are held accountable for their actions.
It is well recognised within the system that there are no votes to be won by a government wanting to take a softer approach with juvenile offenders. It also takes a lot of effort to actually get sent to Banksia Hill; 95 per cent of juvenile offenders remain in the community, and it takes a lot of crime – both in terms of severity and volume – before children end up there.
The fear among those calling for the government to do more is that the community does not end up safer in the long run if those kids rejoin society worse than when they went in. That outcome ends up both more dangerous and more costly for society, when they commit more crimes and are reimprisoned as adults.
“I have no issue with the kids being sent to Banksia Hill detention centre – it’s a matter for the courts and it’s a consequence of their behaviour,” Mr Ryan said.
“But it’s what you do with them. When they get out – and they all will get out – if they’re even more damaged and more bitter and more twisted, they’ll just do worse crimes,” he said.
One of the ex-staffers estimates that 80 per cent or more of the juveniles they dealt with at Banksia Hill subsequently ended up in adult prison.
“Society does not want these kids running around, I get that. But if we’re going to lock them up – and they do need to be locked up – then lock them up properly,” they said.
“These kids are expensive, one way or the other. But if we can get them this young and you actually do the right things, maybe they won’t be for the rest of their lives.”
Those who have worked in Banksia Hill long enough know all too well that the current system has failed to break the cycle of generational disadvantage.
“I can guarantee that my children will be paying for their children,” another ex-staffer said.
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