Australia's prison system killed Cleveland Dodd

The fate of Cleveland Dodd was determined by a cruel incarceration system that is designed to punish instead of reform, writes Gerry Georgatos.

I'VE BEEN SUPPORTING the family of the late Cleveland Dodd — a tragedy that, in a decent world, would never happen. This is not a decent world, it is a wicked world and I will explain.

Once upon a time, I was a PhD Law researcher in Australian Deaths in Custody. That was a long time ago, but everything I uncovered to be true then remains true today.

Cleveland Dodd’s tragic death must lead to convictions and a litany of long overdue reforms. This unnecessary tragedy has exposed a long-established culture of neglect and maladaptive misbehaviours in those vested with the immediate care of society's most vulnerable children — the kids who finish in juvenile prisons.

It is society that killed Cleveland; it is governments who killed this 16-year-old; it is the sins of a nation that took this boy to the grave.

Cleveland Dodd's fate is Australia's national shame

The funeral of a teenager who passed away while inside WA's juvenile detention system was marred by unwanted controversy.

The maltreatment of children in juvenile prisons is a systemic determinant. Because deaths in custody are ongoing, systems are therefore involved. There has been no repair. A death in custody is not just about the micro-circumstances of the carceral estate of the prison in question. A death in custody is about the macro-societal circumstances.

Deaths in custody occur because Australia spends on punishing and not on supporting. Deaths in custody occur because Australia builds hovels of human misery and dungeons where hope is extinguished.

Australia incarcerates in higher numbers year after year. Deaths in custody are ongoing because governments and departments diabolically minimise the fallout from deaths in custody, reprehensibly standing by the custodial officers rather than ensuring the procurement of the truth.

Let us make no mistake that both child and adult prisons are all-out punitive affairs. Let us stop fabricating tales that they are bastions of the rehabilitative, restorative and transformational. In general, the majority come out worse than when they went in.

Let us understand that since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, we are fast approaching 600 Black deaths in custody. Let us understand that in that same time, there have been over 2,000 non-First Nations deaths in custody. One in five deaths in prisons is First Nations. With one in three prisoners comprised of First Nations, the rate of deaths in custody is higher with non-First Nations. Both rates are diabolical.

I am trying to make readers understand that the carceral system is rotten to the core. Prisons are not fit for any human. They are Australia’s worst human rights abuse. Many prison deaths are at young ages. First Nations prisoners who die in prison die on average 20 years earlier than First Nations people living in the general population and non-First Nations prisoners who die in prison die 30 years earlier.

Yet, since the end of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991, the total Australian prisoner population doubled from around 15,000 in 1991 to around 30,000 in 2011. In 2022, the prisoner population increased by a further 50 per cent.

Prison tragedy highlights child incarceration cruelty

The recent death of a child in custody has raised concerns about Australia's youth detention system.

For First Nations peoples in 1991, one in seven Australian prisoners was a descendant of the First Peoples. By 2011, one in four Australian prisoners was a descendant of the First Peoples. Three years later, to the present, one in three Australian prisoners is a descendant of the First Peoples.

The high-volume exposure of First Peoples, young and older, to incarceration, is the most immediate cause of Black deaths in custody — mass incarceration of Australia's First Peoples.

Prisoner suicides have always been high for First Nations and non-First Nations because incarceration is the worst of the human experience, at least in Australia. It is an indictment of the nation and all its societies.

Prisons are the worst of the classist narratives. Australia’s prisons, all 132 of them – 17 are child prisons – are this nation’s rubbish bins. There is no intention to help the downtrodden. Australia does not care. Governments do not care. The top end of town does not care. If they all did, Australia’s prisons would be fewer and those prisons remaining would be transformative establishments.

Prisons are creating a sicker underclass, one that is demonised and that society hounds into the gutter and to early graves — paupers' graves.

Australia killed Cleveland Dodd.

On the early morning that Cleveland took his last breaths in that cell, where his eye’s fading light was dungeon walls and a concrete floor, not in a hospital ICU, I was dramatically called by insiders – in government and from a particular bastion – and was told, “A boy has died in his cell in Unit 18”.

There was hysteria at the presumed fallout, so it was decided by some that the boy should be pumped with air – life support – and with time, minimise the fallout. It is hard to believe but too often the truth is implausible. The ability to discover the truth is outstripped by the capacity to manifest deceit.

Hopefully, the coronial inquest, the Corruption and Crime Commission investigations and the all-important Levitt and Robinson Lawyers class action reveal just enough discoverable truth to ensure unnatural deaths in custody come to an end and prisons are compelled to transform into positive well-being bastions where people are helped.

We often say we weren’t put on this Earth to bury our children. We also weren’t put on this Earth to kill children, whether indirectly or otherwise.