The WA Corrective Services Minister has again found himself at odds with experts – including some from within his own Department – about the treatment of young people in detention. As the national children's commissioner continues to call for an end to detention and a focus on alternatives, the Minister says some young detainees only have themselves to blame for spending longer in their cells. A warning, this story contains the image of an Aboriginal person who has died.
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00:00As the inquest into WA's first death in youth detention continues, the conflicting paths
00:07forward are becoming clearer.
00:08There needs to be a consequence.
00:10There needs to be a place that you can place them in a safe fashion and that is true of
00:16juveniles as it is of adults.
00:18The problem is that the focus of those institutions is on incarceration.
00:25It is not on turning those young lives around.
00:29Experts say one factor getting in the way of that is the amount of time young people
00:33are spending in their cells.
00:35The coroner's court this week heard young people in WA's main youth detention centre
00:39can get up to 10 hours out of their cell each day.
00:42For young people at Unit 18, a youth facility inside a maximum security adult prison, who
00:47are far more complex, challenging and very often violent and dangerous, it's eight hours
00:53a day.
00:54I want them to be out of cell all the time.
00:57If they behave themselves and don't assault people and don't assault each other.
01:01If they've been violent in Unit 18, is that not a failure of the programs and the job
01:07that you're meant to be doing in rehabilitation?
01:09No, I think it's a failure of their behaviour.
01:13A position experts maintain is simplistic.
01:16Children's behaviour is driven fundamentally and primarily by the environments they're
01:21kept in.
01:22The coroner's court has heard similar evidence as it probes the death of 16-year-old Cleveland
01:26Dodd a week after self-harming inside Unit 18, including from mental health nurse David
01:32Etherington who told the court young people need their needs met.
01:36He said when that doesn't happen they accelerate their behaviours.
01:40If their needs are met, then everything de-escalates.
01:43It's the underlying causes of offending by children we need to be putting our attention
01:48on.
01:49While the government continues to point to improved conditions in youth detention, the
01:52coroner's court has heard there's still a long way to go for the system to be able to
01:57address those underlying causes.