Banksia Hill children’s prison: The facts and the answers

As Western Australia's Banksia Hill continues its legacy of cruelty, alternatives must be discussed on ways to better rehabilitate youth offenders. Gerry Georgatos offers advice.

WESTERN AUSTRALIA’S Banksia Hill child prison nightmare is enduring its first loss of a child in custody. The family will soon bury their 16-year-old loved one.

I am a prison abolitionist. However, abolition will not occur anytime soon while every Australian state and territory is putridly bent on tough-on-people mantras, for those who criminally offend. The two most draconian jurisdictions are Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

I’ve seen Banksia Hill from the inside, working there as an external, for eight weeks in 2020. I saw the horrible cells of the “Intensive Support Unit”, slagged as the “cage” and misused as punitive detention. I’ve seen the grotesque cells in the compounds.

I am fraught with despair. The uninterrupted failure of Banksia Hill since its establishment in 1997 has culminated in the abomination of the gazetted and segregated holding pen of “Unit 18” in Western Australia’s notorious maximum security adult prison of Casuarina.

Prison tragedy highlights child incarceration cruelty

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

Some of the kids imprisoned in Banksia Hill’s offshoot gulag, Unit 18, are locked in cells 23 hours a day. Some are three-point shackled hours on end, hand and ankle cuffs, with a chain from the handcuffs to the ankle cuffs.

The long confinements in grotesque dank cells on children who are encumbered by cataclysmic hopelessness are evidence Unit 18 was destined as a holding pen for the children government ministers have sadly admitted they do not know what else to do with these troubled kids.

The stir-crazy confinements manifest rebellion. Culminating in self-harms, in cumulative combustion precursive to altercations between guards and kids, and also between the children.

It is not enough to just argue to raise the age of criminal responsibility. This is a given. We must vest in the ways forward, to save these children, to improve their lot, to validate them, believe in them till they believe in themselves, to change the direction of their lives. We must ensure they do not languish lifelong in ruination, in adult gaols and die decades before their time.

There are those who believe the nightmare of Banksia Hill is a combustion of aberrant First Nations youth. I reject this. Banksia Hill is not a Black problem. For the record, the tragedies and travesties of Banksia Hill are not Black, Brown or White problems. Banksia is a systemic problem. A problem made by governments.

There is nothing restorative, rehabilitative, therapeutic or transformational at Banksia. The disproportionality of First Nations children gaoled should not define and disguise the failures of the State as a Black problem. Homelessness is caused by governments not building social housing. Similarly, the WA Government does not invest in the nurture of our State’s most vulnerable children.

If there were genuine diversionary programs for the most seriously vulnerable children – many who are homeless, transient or orphaned – the Children’s Court would be referring children to such programs.

Where children can be released, we must vest support via intensive outreach, often of psychosocial and psycho-educative content, but these models do not exist in WA, nor Australia-wide.

Blood on our hands: Banksia Hill is failing our children

Suicide and incarceration statistics from Banksia Hill prison highlight a lack of proper rehabilitation for our troubled youth.

Where children can be bailed, community-based facilities, well-resourced, must exist and be accessible.

Where children need to be remanded to secure facilities, they must be tiered by age bracket — ten to 12 years, 13 and 14, 15 and 16, 17 and 18. In general, the content of nurture is age-sensitive. These secure facilities must be places where one-on-one support is guaranteed, of equivalencies to “familial” settings. The one-on-one support must be delivered by seasoned expertise where rapport and resonance are core and the love can be spread with salt-of-the-earth approaches.

WA needs to urgently reform child bail laws and present more options for children to remain with families where possible, or for them to be with identifiable responsible adults and/or invest in safety nets where there are substantive outreach supports, mentors and local secure psychosocial community-based facilities.

Half of Western Australia’s bail houses are inoperable and closed. This is deplorable.

I am currently blocked by the State Government from working in the State’s prisons because I helped galvanise the class action on behalf of former and present detainees — thus far 700 plaintiffs. Testimonies to me and my comrades, from hundreds of former and recently released Banksia detainees, describe the same fails and horrors.

Because these forgotten children of Banksia are failed, about 60 to 70 per cent will finish up incarcerated as adults.

The children of Banksia who have been segregated at WA’s notorious maximum security adult gaol, Casuarina, I estimate nearly all will be incarcerated when adults. This is an indictment of us, not them. We have betrayed these children. I know most of the children of Unit 18. They are not “monsters” — they are the children who life’s unfairnesses denied them the beginnings the majority take for granted.

A successful win in the court would ultimately compel governments to humane ways forward instead of a children’s prison, to a plethora of reforms and to a firmament of social care systems and supports. Why does it have to be this way?

Thousands more will be registered as plaintiffs by the time of a court ruling. Hundreds of testimonies describing much the same goes to corroboration, the heart and soul of evidence.

Prisons no place for young children

Australia's juvenile detention system is failing our troubled youths and reform is urgently needed to rehabilitate those in need.

If we win in the courts, precedents will be set for changes and reforms not just in WA, but which can be tapped into by every state and territory because we shone the light on Banksia Hill.

During the hard border lockdown during the COVID pandemic, in March 2020, there was called the statewide quarantine with residents required to isolate in their homes. The quarantine would last two months. All eight external services to Banksia ceased. All non-essential workers pulled the pin. Banksia experienced its lowest-ever staff levels.

For years, I begged state governments to allow high calibre wide-remit restorative models into Banksia. I won the support of former Minister for Corrective Services, Fran Logan, but the battle to get us in was arduous. Mr Logan retired prior to last year’s election.

However, when the eight services ceased at Banksia during the statewide coronavirus quarantine, (then) Department of Corrective Services commissioners summoned me and colleague, Megan Krakouer, to Banksia. We began immediately.

The next morning, I said to Megan and another colleague, my daughter, “We may never get this opportunity again, so let us do everything we can to assist as many children as possible.”

We focused on the female detainees, aged 11 to 18. When we commenced at Banksia, the female detainee population was 18. I applied to the Children’s Court to release as many as possible and it did. We provided substantive post-release support. Within eight weeks, we had more than halved the female detainee population to seven detainees.

Eight weeks and our time was up. We were not as needed with quarantining relaxed and services returning. We had taken it upon ourselves to set a demonstrative example of what works. We showed what psychosocial and restorative support looks like.

The children of Banksia need one-on-one support. Intense psychosocial and psycho-educative transformational models must be crafted around one-on-one support and nurture.

Banksia Hill nightmare highlights urgent need for prison reform

Western Australia's Banksia Hill children's prison is an example of a failed rehabilitation system for incarcerated youth.

Unit 18 must be abolished. No ifs and buts. It is obscene for anyone to claim there are no alternatives.

We must transform Banksia Hill – and all of Australia’s child prisons – into restorative bastions of nurture. Banksia Hill does not need to be demolished, but it must not be a prison. It can be a restorative beacon of nurture for Perth’s most disadvantaged and marginalised children — age-sensitive psych-educative and psychosocial programs. A place where there is a focus on rapport and resonance, where children relate to transformation and then are supported even more deeply and widely on the outside.

But Banksia Hill must not be a place where children are uprooted from outside of Perth, it must only be for the children of Perth.

If Banksia Hill has a hundred children inside, simply, we must have one hundred seasoned mentors nurturing these children — age content-sensitive and tiered. The social return will be of the most beneficial value individuated and societal.

We must recognise the disproportionality of the incarcerated children of the First Peoples as the culmination of the sins of a nation. Understanding the unfairness is the first step to our atonement as a nation and the redeemer in all of us can redress.

Therefore, ensure sections 50(D) and 51 of the Equal Opportunity Act and deploy workforce parity – the principle of proportionality – with workers in Banksia Hill and all juvenile detention facilities across Australia as First Nations seasoned professionals.

Demographically, states and territories must fund community-based, age-tiered, well-resourced facilities with psychosocial onus and respectable quality rooms for our neediest children, instead of grotesque, stir-crazy gaol cells. I will not write extensively on age content and curricula and models of care till we get the bedrock, the firmament established.

In my view, we should raise the age of culpable criminal responsibility to 17. But whether 14 or 17, we must be able to substantially support children who will be detained in other forms considered non-carceral or released altogether.

It is outrageous that Medicare is not availed to Australia’s incarcerated. We must introduce Medicare to all prisons and access to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) to all the incarcerated. There is no greater advocate for an incarcerated individual – particularly a child – than a doctor. Medicare can ensure bulk-billing physicians in every prison.

With post-release, there must be wide remit 24/7 support services — torch bearers to improved lives. There must be aftercare models for life-changing pathways. Imperatively, from a triage-based needs basis, there must also be aftercare critical assists, emergency response outreach teams and humane short-stay respites.

Gerry Georgatos is a suicide prevention and poverty researcher with an experiential focus on social justice. You can follow Gerry on Twitter @GerryGeorgatos.