Children Are Paying the Price in Understaffed Prisons
Chronic understaffing in Australia’s youth detention centres is forcing children into prolonged lockdowns and isolation. These shortages are the result of persistent bureaucratic and administrative failures to properly resource and manage detention facilities. When there are not enough staff to supervise children safely, detention centres respond by locking them alone in cells for hours, sometimes most of the day. In practice, these operational failures are pushing children into conditions that can amount to solitary confinement, leaving them to bear the physical, emotional and psychological consequences of a system that has failed to do its most basic job.
The existing regulations surrounding the use of solitary confinement and isolation measures across Australian jurisdictions are failing to properly protect children. These regulations allow for the extensive use of isolation on the children in youth justice centres due to staff shortages or ‘operational demands’ of the centre. This was the focus of a report on the Cleveland Youth Detention Centre in Queensland which detailed the persistent and frequent staff shortages that resulted in the detainees being placed in separation for significant periods of time.
The report details how Queensland’s Youth Justice Regulation 2016 allows for ‘separation’ – where a child is placed alone in a locked room – in certain circumstances including for ‘routine security purposes’, for the protection of the detainees or to ‘restore order’. Staff shortage separations occur when there are not enough staff to maintain the ‘safe supervision ratio’ – which is a minimum of one detention youth worker to every four children. These separation periods are considered to be implemented for the protection of the detainees and are thereby essentially permitted under Queensland regulations.
Queensland is not the only Australian jurisdiction in which this occurs. Victoria Legal Aid’s submission to the Senate Inquiry into Australia’s youth justice and incarceration system reveal that staff shortages are responsible for lockdowns for up to 23 hours a day. These are justified as a ‘last resort’ or in the interests of the security of the prison. In 2019, the Victorian Ombudsman’s inspection of Victorian prisons reported that the Malmsbury facility had implemented around 13,000 lockdowns – isolation in the interests of centre security – over the period of one year; 40% of these were due to staff shortages.
The Banksia Hill detention centre in Western Australia has been described as a ‘revolving door’ of officers, resulting in rolling lockdowns because there simply aren’t enough staff to run the centre safely. Banksia Hill staff have previously gone on strike to protest against inadequate staffing, stating that there were often less than half of the required personnel. The Disability Royal Commission has openly criticised the Western Australia Department of Justice for its systematic failure to ensure adequate staffing in detention centres, and cited this failure as a crucial factor behind the rolling lockdowns.
Understaffing is a critical issue within the youth justice system. Children are being exposed to significant harm through arbitrary periods of extended isolation that only reinforces the traumatic nature of youth detention. These staff shortage lockdowns also impact the delivery of rehabilitation programs as well as educational and social activities that are crucial to proper child development.
The care and protection of children in Australia’s youth justice system should not be held subject to inadequate staffing. Numerous court decisions have held that isolation as a result of understaffing amounted to unlawful confinement, and that staffing issues, while challenging, do not outweigh ‘the potential for considerable harm’.
Isolation is not an appropriate solution to understaffing issues. Governments have a responsibility to ensure that their youth detention centres have sufficient operational staff and trained youth workers to facilitate the proper protection and rehabilitation of the children in detention. Jurisdictions across Australia must implement robust safeguards and regulations to make sure that harm is not perpetuated through ‘operational procedures.
The system is failing; children should not be forced to pay the price.