Major overhaul for notorious youth centre

A notorious detention centre will be overhauled with $100m purpose-built facility to house Western Australia’s most “dangerous and violent cohort” of juvenile detainees.

Unit 18 was established in 2022 to detain the “most challenging, complex and often dangerous juveniles” after a series of riots at Perth’s Banksia Hill juvenile detention centre.

Several incidents of violence and disruption at Banksia Hill resulted in extensive damage to infrastructure, with inmates starting fires and climbing onto roofs in hours-long stand-offs.

The former director general at WA’s Department of Justice gave evidence to a Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability that year, declaring the facility was in a state of emergency.

He told the commission detainees self-harmed, assaulted staff, damaged cells or escaped from cells almost every day in the first few months of 2022.

In the past year, two teenage boys have taken their own lives while being detained inside Unit 18, with the WA government facing mounting pressure for the facility to be shutdown.

Cleveland Dodd had not long turned 16 when he took his own life at the facility in October last year, an inquest into his death is being held in Perth.

Another 17-year old boy took his life last month at the facility becoming WA’s second recorded death of a child in custody.

Corrective Services Minister Paul Papalia told reporters on Thursday the new facility would house the cohort who are currently inside Unit 18 and would be designed to accommodate the challenges associated with them.

“There is no alternative,” Minister Papalia said.

“You cannot shut Unit 18 and put these juveniles back into Banksia Hill – they will disrupt everybody, they will hurt people, they will harm people and they’ll go back into the community more dangerous and threatening.

“What we’re doing here is purpose designing a facility for this cohort.”

The minister said they had seen an Australian standard maximum security men’s prison at Unit 18 torn apart by its detainees, and now they were designing a facility that would accommodate the teenagers safely to reduce risks of self harm and improve safety for staff and service providers.

“This will be a maximum security facility,” he said.

“It will be, to some extent, hardened internally, but it will be designed from the ground up to house this cohort.

“This sort of real extreme things that we’ve seen in the last decade or so, appears to have escalated in terms of destructive behaviour and violent assaults and damage to facilities, so we confront the challenge we confront now.”

Minister Papalia anticipated the new facility would have high ceilings that could not be reached, and exclude embedded infrastructure inside cells that could be torn off walls or floors and turned into weapons or tools.

Opposition corrective services spokesman Peter Collier said the greatest stain on the Labor government was its treatment of juveniles in youth detention, especially those in Unit 18.

“Unit 18 is despicable and should have been closed the day after it was opened,” he said.

“The Cook Labor government’s punitive approach to juvenile justice, including Unit 18, does not rehabilitate young offenders and it makes Western Australia less safe.

“A replacement facility for Unit 18 needs to be a matter of priority for the Cook Labor government.”

The new facility will be built adjacent to Banksia Hill with the state government allocating $11.5m to complete detailed planning and design of the project.

It’s expected the facility that will replace Unit 18 will cost about $100m to build and accommodate high-risk youth who cannot be safely housed at Banksia Hill providing them with supervision and therapeutic support to address their behaviours and complex needs.

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