Op-Ed by Garth Morgan, Chief Executive Officer of the Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Protection Peak (QATSICPP), Queensland’s Youth Justice Peak Body.
It’s always the sounds that scare us.
When I was a kid, maybe five years old I remember sitting in the lounge room of my Uncle’s rented bungalow in Kawana Waters. Outside was sunny, and being only a few blocks from the beach, the salt in the air underscored the idyllic setting of the Sunshine Coast. It was where I grew up – Kabi Kabi country, and the serenity was about to be shattered by the start of “Screaming Jets” by Johnny Warman. It absolutely petrified me. Even now at 45, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I hear the roar of a fighter jet. So when I stepped in to the Cairns watch house I was transported back to my uncle’s house, overwhelmed by the wall of noise confronting me.
Escorting me was the QPS Inspector responsible for reviewing the state’s watch houses. And in hushed tones, he reminded me that he couldn’t let me talk to anyone in custody.
The first thing he showed us were the reception cells. They were small; not much bigger than a phone booth and made of concrete with all the architectural softness of a brutalist tomb. Hard and cold and imposing, these cells were detainees first introduction to the Cairns watch house and where they would spend their initial time in lock up. We were told the stay in these cells was minutes, and that after the charging officer had made a determination that a person would be detained they would be moved into the watch house proper.
As we moved from the initial processing area to the holding cells, I spied a flimsy plastic envelope stuck to the wall containing ‘child in custody’ forms. On one side, the plastic was split about a third of the way down the envelope from what appeared to be too much use. On this particular day there was one child in the watch house, plus another that was walking out as we were walking in. He’s a 15 year old boy who had spent five days there and looking at today’s numbers was now at eight days, joined by three other kids over the weekend.
The Cairns watch house is as notorious as it is busy, regularly ranking in the top 5 for the highest numbers of detainees. Watch houses in Queensland are intended for short-term detention of people who are waiting for a court appearance of transfer to a detention centre. The Queensland Coroner recently recommended a maximum duration for adult detainees in a watch house as 72 hours. The standard is actually 24 hours and 48 hours if a detainee comes into a watch house after court finishes on a Saturday – 72 hours is reserved for when the following Monday is a public holiday and court recommences on the Tuesday.
Why isn’t there a similar provision for children in the Youth Justice Act?
When I first saw the 15 year old boy, he was lying on his back staring silently at the ceiling. I wondered how many hours he’d been lying there. Looking into his cell, I was assaulted by enough blue light to send a sleep specialist into apoplexy. Maybe that’s why he was lying there listless. Maybe he couldn’t sleep. Maybe it was the blue light.
Maybe it’s the constant yelling coming from the adults in custody.
It was hard to isolate the wails of despair from the roars of anger with the sound bouncing across the cells like a tennis ball across the net – grunts included. Every now and then, you could hear the word ‘fuck’ rise above the cacophony. The walls were covered with graffiti, and in the concrete exercise pen – the only place I was able to get a glimpse of natural light – someone had scrawled the words ‘medical treatment’ prominently in the space.
I can only pray to god it wasn’t written by one of the children.
Back inside, we were taken to where girls were held at the end of the row of cells housing women. As we moved down the row, one of the women shouted to the police officer with us asking for a cuppa.
“Sure,” he said, “how do you take it?”
“Black and handsome,” was her reply. Then she erupted into a laughing fit somewhere between a guffaw and a witch’s cackle.
Notwithstanding the half eaten sandwiches strewn on the floor, it was a fleeting moment of levity before we got to the end of the row and were shown where little girls had to use the toilet and shower. Directly off the corridor with no door or screens of any kind for privacy, we peered into a stainless steel box with three sides where I imagine terrified children rush to wash themselves before being seen by an officer doing a casual walk around the cells.
It was at this point I felt the bile rise in my throat, unable to get the shame and indignity these children must experience out of my head. My own daughter, just 11 years old, is considered old enough to be subjected to these conditions.
Some children, desperate to get out of the watch house – even to prison – threaten, or indeed attempt suicide. But instead of being assessed by a medical professional, children who are referred to as suies (pronounced sue-ee) by the police are stripped of their clothes and put into smocks before being herded into an isolation cell with other children who’ve expressed suicidal thoughts.
Some children are locked up in tiny cells with not so much padded but spongy walls and floors to stop them from hurting themselves. The doors to these cells are heavy. At over 100kg I’m a strong man and I had to work to close the doors and I imagine that’s why they come in two halves. It was these doors that a 14 year old girl had slammed on her arm with enough force to break it. Having closed these doors myself, the officers must have been angry to move the doors that fast.
Making my way back to the entrance I noticed a smell, possibly body odour, but maybe also old food and urine.
As the tour concluded, I felt a deep sense of shame for how our society treats children in these spaces. No child should ever be subjected to the inside of a watch house.
