Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Don Dale no place for children?
The current ‘Don Dale’ is the former Berrimah adult prison, built in the 1970s. The prison was never intended for rehabilitation and still less for children. It was closed down in 2014 and destined for demolition. Later that year, when the original Don Dale closed down, Berrimah Prison was reopened and renamed ‘Don Dale Youth Detention Centre’.
Children are being kept in cells measuring 2m x 3m in a facility surrounded by walls and barbed wire. This goes against accepted design standards for youth detention centres and contravenes UN principles. The White/Gooda Royal Commission found that Don Dale was “not fit for accommodating, let alone rehabilitating, children and young people” due to its “severe, prison-like and unhygienic conditions”.
The latest report from the NT Children’s Commissioner in December 2021 found that there is no therapeutic framework in Don Dale. It found that children at risk of self-harm were left for over 23 hours per day in isolation awaiting medical treatment. It found that the guards have no training in developmental trauma and that staffing issues have resulted in children being denied basic education and medical services.
Incarcerating children compounds their trauma. It has severe, negative effects on the children, their families and communities, and wider society. There is no such thing as a "good" children"s prison. The atrocious conditions in Don Dale are not an accident, or a case of a few bad apples. This is not incompetence or apathy. It is the inevitable consequence of our carceral approach to youth justice.
Don’t we need to be "tough on crime"?
The Northern Territory has the highest imprisonment rate in the world—much higher than the USA. In the NT, juvenile detention levels are 7–8 times higher than other States and Territories in Australia. It has always been this way, and it has never had a good effect on crime rates. Figures show that many young people who are released from detention return within twelve months.
Relying on formal charging as a means of responding to youth offending is not developmentally appropriate for the majority of children and young people and is counterproductive in most cases. The majority of young offenders mature out of crime and many longitudinal studies have highlighted that only 5–10% of young people who commit antisocial acts become chronic offenders.
The Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory
Punishment clearly fails as a deterrent. It is extremely expensive and demonstrably makes crime worse. Even short periods spent in detention on remand make kids more likely to reoffend. We have had access to this evidence since before the original Don Dale was even built.
Children have excellent prospects for rehabilitation. Young people who are placed in well-resourced diversionary programs are far more likely to stay out of jail. Thus, rehabilitation is better for children and for the community, which is better protected as a result.
Bear in mind also that over 80% of the children in Don Dale are on remand, which means they are still waiting to attend court. Although these children are innocent until proven guilty, they can nonetheless spend long periods in detention, which negatively affects their mental health, severs their connection to their families and serves to institutionalise them. Even short periods of detention can affect a child’s wellbeing and compromise cognitive development. Children as young as 10 are still detained in Don Dale.
What about the victims?
Studies going back many years consistently show that detention increases recidivism. In the words of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, “It is in everyone’s interest to ensure that juvenile offenders remain outside of the justice system”.
Victim involvement in diversion programs, where appropriate, can be an effective way to reduce recidivism and help children understand the impact of their actions and actually make amends. According to evidence gathered by NAAJA, victims who attend restorative conferences are consistently more satisfied with the handling of their cases and suffer less from post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.
Victims of youth crime do not necessarily want children to be detained in Don Dale. Victims often request that kids complete community work, but Territory Families has ignored these requests for a number of years.
Evidence clearly shows that an evidence-based approach to youth justice produces the best results. It puts offenders in a position to connect with their community and make a positive contribution to society, rather than engage in reoffending.
There is evidence that young people who have been institutionalised ‘get into worse trouble, are more likely to commit worse crimes, are less employable, are more likely to be on a path toward lifelong failure and are more likely to pass their problems on to their children.
The Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory
Children in youth detention have often experienced multiple significant traumas. We must recognise that they are also victims and survivors. Acknowledging this is fundamental to trauma-informed rehabilitation and therefore fundamental to reducing crime.
If Don Dale is closed, where are the children going to go?
The children should never have been there in the first place.
When we frame this as a choice between youth detention and something else, the question itself implies that youth detention is a viable option. This country must ask ourselves why we take for granted that imprisoning children will correct their behaviour and help them become good citizens. There is no evidence for this practice. It is well-established that youth detention in fact worsens recidivism and the seriousness of crimes, so it should not even be on the table as a solution to youth crime.
Separating children from their families and communities and grouping them with other offenders serves only to create a shared sense of identity based on criminality and incarceration. Rehabilitating youth offenders necessitates the opposite—fostering their sense of belonging and connectedness to their wider community. Rehabilitating groups of youth offenders requires access to family and community, strong role models, mentors and caregivers with the skills necessary to foster each child’s sense of identity as more than simply ‘offender’.
Children must have the right to be rehabilitated on their own country, with access to their own culture, community and language.
Nowhere in Australia jails children under 10 years old, and the Northern Territory is transitioning away from jailing children under 12, so we have already collectively admitted that there are viable options for dealing with youth crime. Similarly, other countries have even higher minimum ages of criminal responsibility, while those such as Finland and Norway have no youth detention centres at all.
Aboriginal communities must be empowered to implement youth justice solutions according to their local circumstances and needs. Long-term solutions will necessitate early intervention and support, which means we also need to look critically at the child protection system and much more. An appropriate approach to youth crime should be a continuation of community-based support that prioritises a child’s wellbeing and connection to culture, community and country from birth.
The government has consistently demonstrated that it cannot be trusted to care for children, manage facilities, follow the clear directions supplied by the Royal Commission, or consult appropriately with Aboriginal organisations—or even its own committees and forums. Only when Aboriginal people lead Aboriginal justice will we see the positive, achievable changes outlined in the Royal Commission.
Many of the necessary changes will take time, but we can take immediate action to both empty Berrimah Prison and reduce youth crime.
Kids under 14
The agencies that provide services to children in the NT have, for years, strongly supported the Royal Commission’s recommendation to keep kids under 14 out of detention. Detailed information has been gathered to make sure that there are enough programs and services to meet the needs of these children. The government has continually put off the change, insisting that it would raise the age under the new Single Act for Children, by 2021. However, by the end of 2021, it admitted that there would be no Single Act. There is no good operational reason why these children should be in detention.
Kids with disabilities
A very high percentage of children in detention may have severe neurodevelopment impairment, a brain injury or Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). Disabilities associated with FASD include reduced impulse control and difficulty reasoning and recognising the consequences of actions. There is a significant under-identification of disability among Aboriginal children and many young people with disabilities are wrongly detained. Multidisciplinary assessments are essential for understanding the reasons for offending behaviour. Kids with disabilities should be appropriately supported to change their behaviour instead of simply thrown in prison.
Overcharged children
Overcharging is a long-recognised problem in the youth justice system. It refers to the police practice of charging children with numerous offences that are not supported by evidence. Police regularly advise the Court that evidence is forthcoming, so a bail decision must be made on the basis of the charges alone. This is an attempt to ensure that the child is locked up and not granted bail. The unsubstantiated charges are later withdrawn. For example, a child may face in excess of 70 charges, which are later reduced to fewer than 5. By that time, the child has already been detained. This contributes to the massive percentage of detainees in Don Dale on remand.
Overcharging also contributes to the public perception that the police’s hard work is undermined by the courts. For example, offenders with a multitude of charges may still be granted bail or diverted. It is easy for the media to frame these cases in terms such as “youth on a crime spree released back into the community”.
Diversion
Diversion programs provide enormous cost savings, compared to detaining children. They also reduce recidivism, which keeps the community safer and prevents children from becoming entrenched in the criminal justice system. Police officers use their discretion to determine whether an offender is eligible for diversion—the same police that regularly overcharge kids to ensure that they are locked up. Police admit that their decision making can be influenced by the media and its portrayal of community expectations, and that those influences can outweigh a proper application of diversion principles.
Police referral policies and practices also lead to the underutilisation of diversion. For example, when several kids are arrested at the same time, it can be difficult to assess them all for diversion eligibility on the spot. In the past, police have opted to arrest and charge offenders, with the assumption that prosecutors will later catch any mistakes and redirect children to diversion, where appropriate. However, the government’s 2021 amendments to the Youth Justice Act served to prevent the courts from fixing these mistakes—ensuring that more children needlessly go through the courts.
Bail support and accommodation
Bail support and accommodation could drastically reduce the remand population in Don Dale, which represents the vast majority of detainees. It has long been recognised that many children are held on remand because they do not have appropriate accommodation or supervision, cannot access support services, or have breached their bail conditions—often on account of not having appropriate accommodation or supervision, or inability to access support services.
Between 2018 and 2019, the government allegedly invested to expand bail services to include programs for young people with high risk complex needs. Supported youth accommodation is also necessary for youth throughout the Territory, who are otherwise transported to detention centres on remand. The remainder of detainees on remand would require bail support, which the government boasts is currently available in both Darwin and Alice Springs. Providing bail support and accommodation is far cheaper than detaining children on remand in Don Dale, and more effective at reducing crime.
Alternatives to the justice system
Evidence clearly shows that the best strategy for reducing youth crime is to keep young people out of the justice system entirely. Some remote Aboriginal communities have repeatedly expressed their preference for young offenders to spend time on country, where Elders can oversee their rehabilitation in line with their own Culture.
Even now, applications for on-country bail can be made via telephone or video call to avoid transporting young people great distances to appear before court—or requiring their families to transport them. However, police have an uncooperative attitude towards applying for bail over the phone and insist on unnecessarily transporting children to major centres. Removing these children from their families and putting them through the courts begins the process of institutionalising them. We must empower communities to rehabilitate children on country, where much better outcomes can be achieved for everyone involved.
Aboriginal Customary Law should be respected and facilitated. The role of Ceremony in rehabilitation should be recognised. Completing work in the community benefits the community, as well as both victims and offenders. Group conferencing is also a successful way for offenders to learn the consequences of their actions and address their offending behaviour.
Aboriginal organisations have offered programs for rehabilitating high risk, juvenile repeat offenders. BushMob’s Apmere Mwerre program at Loves Creek Station was an alternative sentencing option that was forced to shut down when the government refused to meet basic infrastructure requirements. The Mount Theo Outstation is an internationally recognised rehabilitation program for Walpiri youth, which has also failed to receive adequate funding. There are many examples of community-led programs for at risk youth in the NT which have long been chronically underfunded.
“…governments should recognise that local community based and devised strategies have the greatest prospect of success and this recognition should be reflected in funding”
Recommendation 236 of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991).
Service delivery
The Commonwealth and Northern Territory governments and non-Aboriginal organisations must be held accountable for decades of policies and programs that have failed to close the gap on every single indicator. No amount of money can change the outcomes of a racist system that is built on and centred around settler colonialism. Attempts to manage this issue on behalf of Aboriginal people will inevitably fail.
The transactional nature of service delivery in the NT significantly hinders communities’ abilities to collaborate and coordinate services. Competitive tendering in thin markets leads to short-term contracts, fragmented service delivery with inefficient overlaps and decreased sustainability and capacity for forward planning. It also gives large, non-Aboriginal organisations an advantage and impairs cooperation between services. Neither non-Aboriginal service providers nor the police have the cultural competency to deliver these services. Aboriginal cultural competency must be at the forefront of these services.
There is no excuse for continuing to detain children in Don Dale. The government has access to millions in misallocated youth justice funds. It has had five years and countless opportunities to get children out of Don Dale, where they remain at significant risk of lasting harm. Experts have been calling for urgent action for years. Aboriginal organisations and communities are ready and willing to tackle this problem.
This is an emergency.
The NT Government says it is building a new facility. Why isn’t that good enough?
A new facility is not the answer. The government has already ignored a key Royal Commission recommendation that it is not built next to an adult prison. It has consistently refused to listen to input from experts, committees or Aboriginal organisations and communities on the subject of youth justice. This government has been defending the continued use of Don Dale for five years. It clearly has no understanding of, nor interest in evidence-based policy.
The new facility has also been revised to increase capacity by 30%. This is in line with the government’s widely-criticised 2021 legislative changes to the Youth Justice Act and the Bail Act, which serve to ensure that even more children are detained. It is not in line with the Royal Commission recommendation to minimise the number of detained young people (especially those on remand and under the age of 14) or even the government’s own Aboriginal Justice Agreement, which purportedly aims to reduce imprisonment of Aboriginal people.
A large, centralised detention facility is useful for one purpose—removing children from their communities and families, criminalising them and institutionalising them. It is no accident that the NT government has never appropriately invested in Aboriginal-owned programs. The youth justice system has, for decades, been described by experts as a continuation of child removal policies. That has not changed. Research and reports have consistently found that Aboriginal-led solutions are superior to youth incarceration.
The new centre represents another $70 million towards making this problem worse. Far from "good enough", it is overwhelming proof that we cannot trust the government to reform the system.