TranscriptCreator - NT Royal Comm Web view.ROYAL COMMISSION 29.6.17P-5331 ©Commonwealth of Australia.ROYAL COMMISSION 29.6.17P-5283K. DEDEL ©Commonwealth of Australia.ROYAL COMMISSION

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TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS

O/N H-784709

THE HONOURABLE M. WHITE AO, CommissionerMR M. GOODA, Commissioner

IN THE MATTER OF A ROYAL COMMISSION INTO THE CHILD PROTECTION AND YOUTH DETENTION SYSTEMS OF THE NORTHERN TERRITORY

DARWIN

9.22 AM, THURSDAY, 29 JUNE 2017

Continued from 28.6.17

DAY 52

MR P.J. CALLAGHAN SC appears with MR P. MORRISSEY SC, MR T. McAVOY SC, MR B. DIGHTON, MS V. BOSNJAK, MR T. GOODWIN, MS S. McGEE and MS R. RODGER as Counsel AssistingMS S. BROWNHILL appears with MR G. O’MAHONEY for the Northern Territory of AustraliaDR P. DWYER appears for the North Australian Aboriginal Justice AgencyMS F. GRAHAM appears for the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid ServiceMR S. O’CONNELL appears for AN

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MR GOODWIN: Good morning, Commissioners. Apologies for the delay this morning but we now have, by invitation via video link from Cody, Wyoming, Dr Kelly Dedel.

<KELLY DEDEL, CALLED [9.24 am]

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Good morning, here, Dr Dedel. Thank you very much for accepting our invitation to come and give us the benefit of your thinking in this Commission. Next to me is Commissioner Gooda and I am Commissioner White.

COMMISSIONER GOODA: Good morning?---Good morning.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: And we understand that it has been a bit of hunt the thimble to find the best spot from which to be beamed into us, so thank you for being so patient?---Absolutely. I’m glad we found a workaround.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Thank you. Yes, Mr Goodwin.

MR GOODWIN: Thank you, Commissioners. Dr Dedel, could you please state your full name?---My name is Kelly Dedel.

And you’ve given a précis of evidence that you signed on 15 May 2017. That’s right?---That’s correct.

And there are three annexures to that précis?---Yes.

I tender the précis and annexures, Commissioners.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: I think it is exhibit 632. Thank you.

EXHIBIT #632 PRÉCIS OF EVIDENCE OF KELLY DEDEL DATED 15/05/2017

MR GOODWIN: Thank you.

Dr Dedel, you are currently the director of One in 37 research and you have a PhD in clinical psychological; that’s correct?---That’s correct.

And we have your curriculum vitae for more detail, but it’s fair to say you have a long background in juvenile justice reform over the past 18 years?---Yes, that’s right.

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And your areas of expertise are the conditions of confinement, behaviour change, suicide prevention, and quality assurance?---Yes, that’s right.

You’ve acted as a court monitor in a number of cases involving settlement agreements in litigation involving alleged breaches of law associated with the operation of juvenile justice systems. Could you please explain the role of a court monitor in those circumstances?---Sure. Usually, I work with a team of people with varying expertise. My expertise, you’ve just mentioned, and I usually work with a psychiatrist, a medical doctor, an education professional, sometimes a fire safety expert, and as a team we’re charged with reporting to the court the jurisdictional progress in the remedial measures that are specified in the ..... so those vary in terms of specificity, but generally are around addressing violence, uses of force, behaviour management programming - - -

Dr Dedel, I might just - - -?--- - - - and then the various specialities such as - - -

Dr Dedel, I might interrupt you briefly, I’m sorry. Do you mind - - -?---Sure.

There’s a bit of feedback. Do you mind muting your computer - - -?---Yep. I have done.

- - - rather than your phone ..... computer?---Yes. I have done that.

Okay. Sorry to have interrupted. If you could continue?---That’s okay. Sure. So as a team, we monitor whether the jurisdiction is complying with the various remedial measures that were set out in the consent decree, designed to correct the harms that were identified during the investigation.

You’ve been court monitor across a number of jurisdictions. Have these jurisdictions been a homogenous or a diverse collection of sites?---They’ve been different in terms of the size. Some of them, like the jurisdiction I’m working in right now has 11,000 inmates down to a small detention centre in Louisiana, that had a bed capacity of 30. So I’ve kind of worked on everything in between there. And they also differ both in whether the children placed there are pre-trial or post decision, and they vary geographically in what part of the company they’re in, which brings with it different challenges in terms of the ..... economic situation of the area, the labour force, and that kind of thing.

And the Commission is particularly interested in your position as lead monitor from 2009 to 2015 for the litigation United States v the State of Ohio. Could you please described the background to that litigation?---Sure. That case began several years before the case was settled and I became involved. There was a long investigation, as part of a private lawsuit called the SH lawsuit, and that was a class action lawsuit. I got involved when the Federal Justice Department launched a parallel investigation of their own and found some additional deficiencies, and so for several years I worked entirely on the DoJ version of that case, although eventually the two cases merged ..... the same monitoring team, we had the same standard that we were trying


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to achieve. My primary role there was in looking at violence reduction, excessive and unnecessary use of force, the investigation of staff misconduct, and how ..... for kids in terms of what sanctions might be imposed when a youth violated the rules.

There’s still some feedback, Dr Dedel. If you could mute your phone. I think the video is fine, but if we attempt to mute the phone, that might help?---I don’t think you will be able to hear me if .....

I will say something quickly after you mute it, and if you can’t hear me then you can unmute?---I’ve muted the phone, but I don’t think you can hear me.

Can – we can hear you, but can you hear us?---Yes, I can.

Okay. That’s much better.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Yes.

MR GOODWIN: Thank you.?---Okay. Excellent.

We got there in the end. Thank you?---Okay.

When you were appointed lead monitor in the Ohio lawsuit, what did you observe about the operation of detention centres in Ohio? In particular what were the main problems?---The main problems that I was focused on were high levels of youth on youth violence, high levels of youth on staff violence, and then the staff’s response to those problems that were reliant on physical restraint that was often excessive in the amount of force that were used. Sometimes it was unnecessary altogether. And so all of the circumstances that led to – resulted in, and the response to youth violence was a key concern of mine.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: I’m a bit interested - - -?---And then flowing from that - - -

Sorry, Dr Dedel. I’m a little interested in how that – how the United States Justice Department became involved in that sort of litigation. I realise that it’s a side issue for you, in your evidence to us, but can you just fill us in on how they came to be involved?---There’s a Federal statute called the – it’s called the Civil Rights of Incarcerated Persons Act and it covers corrections, nursing homes, developmentally disabled facilities, and it gives the federal government the right to oversee the functioning of those types of facilities that are run by state and local jurisdictions.

Thank you. Sorry, Mr Goodwin. You can - - -

MR GOODWIN: Thank you, Commissioner. It’s my understanding from your précis that in Ohio some children were spending up to 70 per cent of their time in isolation; that’s correct?---Yes. That was one of the key responses to the violence that we were interested in, that for some kids who engaged in violence over and over


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again – would get their sanctions stacked on top of each other and end up spending most of their time in isolation, which ironically deprived them of all the programs and services which were designed to help them deal with what was underlying the violence.

And - - -?---So that was a big concern of ours, was the chronic violence among a small segment of kids.

And did you find that the use of isolation led to – itself to increased violence between detainees themselves and detainees and staff?---Yes, indeed. The kids emerged from isolation more angry, more frustrated, more hopeless. Those with mental health issues had tended to decompensate during their time, and again they weren’t given the opportunity to learn or use or practise any of the skills that would help them manage those situations. So it was really a cyclical problem that the response added to the problem.

You eventually issued a joint report titled the Ohio Model, with the other relevant court monitor Will Harrell and his special assistant Terry Schuster - - -?---Yep.

- - - in 2015. At a general level, how had the Ohio juvenile justice system, particularly its detention centres, changed over that seven year period?---Well, they radically changed the programming and their approach to kids. They focused on providing kids with more programming, more activities. They reduced their idle time. They increased the treatment services that would help them develop the skills they need to manage conflict, and that kind of thing, and they radically changed the consequences of rule violations so that instead of – like I just said, the response kept contributing to the problem. Now, the consequences for violations are really skill focused, and they were about teaching the kid the thing that the kid needed to learn to change their behaviour in the future.

And we might - - -?---So that was a major difference.

And we might go into a bit more depth about those types of programs. Did you see, at the end of your time as a court monitor, benefits flow from that approach and, as a result, how – what did you witness in terms of those problems that you identified in 2007?---Right. Well, with all of the changes they made, they drastically reduced violence, both youth on youth violence and youth on staff violence, and they also reduced the amount of misconduct amongst staff that they had been seeing. Because staff were better trained, they were more suited to the role, and so you didn’t see the cycle of staff being pulled out of the system for violating policies and sort of egregious uses of force. So there were positive outcomes for both the youth and the staff as a result of the reforms that they made.

We’ve heard evidence this week that an essential feature of juvenile justice reform is to reduce the population entering into detention centres. If reform of the detention centres themselves is to work, do you agree with that view?---Absolutely.


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And is that what happened in Ohio?---Yes. As part of the reform movement – and this wasn’t a part that I worked on, but obviously it was influenced by it because the number of kids was reduced, they launched what was called RECLAIM Ohio, which was about keeping kids close to their home communities rather than shipping them off to these kind of distant state facilities. And so, through doing that, they reduced the population in the facilities significantly.

One figure has it that the population of 2000 went down to 500 by the time that your role ended; that’s correct?---That’s correct. And it enabled them to close a couple of their facilities too.

Which, no doubt, led to cost savings?---Yes, I’m sure.

And talking – returning to the direct experience in Ohio in terms of the detention centres themselves, you’ve set out in your précis the number of reforms that occurred within those detention centres. Before I discuss each of those, I note that these reforms occurred over a seven year process. In your experience, is that the type of timeframe necessary for sustainable reform to be achieved?---Absolutely. I think I’ve worked in about 12 jurisdictions in this type of case and it has always been a multi-year project.

Turning to the direct forms in the detention centres, you mentioned that Ohio developed a continuum of alternative behaviour management tools, and put this in place before prohibiting the use of isolation as a consequence of rule violation. Could you please provide some examples of those alternative tools?---Well, they had a – or developed a typical kind of point and level system where the kids accrue points throughout the day when they meet behavioural expectations, and those points can be transferred into things of value, whether it is food, or TV time, or time with an Xbox, something like that. So that was really the core of – for those kids who could be more easily persuaded, making it clear what the standards around behaviour were. As kids achieved more in that system, they were promoted to different levels where they got increasing privileges: they could stay up later, they could go to special activities, they could have extended visits with their families. But when they broke a serious rule, they lost those privileges, and so the system became organised around a reward and incentive based system, rather than the application of something aversive like putting them in isolation. So that was the core of the change. They also changed the mechanism by which the consequences were put in place. Before, it was the work of a hearing officer. He was a uniform staff, you know, kind of like a court hearing, a mini court hearing. What they changed that to was a treatment team based process, because the treatment team would know and understand what the kids challenges better than this hearing officer who didn’t have ongoing interaction with the kid. The treatment team then was able to design consequences that were more suited to what the kid actually need, and so that process and the new choices that were put in place were really central to them being able to move away from using isolation. But they had to be built first, and the staff had to understand them, they had to have confidence in them. They had to believe that the things would be imposed, and only then would it be seen as a legitimate way to respond to


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misconduct. I’ve worked in other jurisdictions that didn’t do that, that just stopped using a certain consequence without having something to replace it with, and so they would go through a period of time where they were literally no consequences for behaviour, and so Ohio was very smart in the sequencing of how they moved away from isolation.

And what were the consequences you’ve seen in other jurisdictions where that wasn’t done? What is the consequence for the operation of a detention centre for immediately, say, cutting off the use of isolation, rather than in the staged approach as you’ve stated occurred in Ohio?---Violence increased both against kids and against staff. Staff became fearful, staff stopped reporting to work, staff respond to kids more aggressively. It was absolutely going in the opposite direction of what the court was trying to achieve.

You mentioned in your précis that part of that process, in terms of behaviour management, was also the development of a sanctions grid. How was the sanctions grid itself developed?---It was developed through a committee that involved both uniform staff, mental health care folks, staff from the central office, the headquarters, and its real purpose was to bring consistency to the process. Because they were moving the decision-making into the treatment teams, and trying to customise this consequence to what the kid needed, there was a real risk that kids would perceive the system as being very unfair, and that a certain treatment team might be more heavy handed, might require more, and for those reasons we were concerned that both the staff and the kids would lose faith in the new system. So the sanctions grid was designed to bring some structure to that. It looked at the severity of what the kid did, and how many times the kid had engaged in a similar severity of behaviour, misconduct, and then gave options within each cell of the grid of what needed to happen. That perhaps you could drop a kid one level, like we talked about, or if there had been three aggressive acts within a 30 day period it required a mental health intervention. So it really, sort of, calibrated the options available and made sure that all of the treatments teams understand what their choices were.

And I assume that clarity in terms of the consistency of a sanction for a rule violation was important for both children and staff?---Yes, for sure. There is research showing that when kids perceive the system and the consequences to be more fair, that they’re more likely to accept it, and their behaviour tends to improve. Similarly, with staff, their buy into the accountability system in my experience has been very central to them adopting a new way of working with kids and moving away from a punitive model into a more therapeutic one. But it really depends on them understanding that there is a new structure. It’s not just, you know, we are going to slap the kid on the hand and be done with it, or give them a stern talking to. But they need to understand the skill focus of it, and that the kids get denied access to the things that they want, and that’s the punishment. So there is definitely a sales process for both the kids and the staff.

And can I talk about that sales process for the kids themselves. This Commission has heard evidence from a number of young people who have been in detention who


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say that they just didn’t know the rules. How is the point system and sanctions grid and consequences for rule violations communicated to young people or what did you see about that process of communication in Ohio?---Well, they start out with teaching the kids about it during orientation. So within I think it’s 48 hours of their arrival at the facility, they sit down with what’s called a youth advocate who goes through a handbook that has not just the rules but how to access a bunch of different things: grievances, the ombudsman, how to get in touch with their attorney, what the rules around family visitation are. And so they get that first introduction when they get there. And then as they go into the living units, the staff also – in Ohio they do a really good job of this, reminding the kids within each segment of the day what the behavioural norms are. So if we are moving to the school building, they talk about what that line movement needs to look like, what they’re supposed to do with their hands. That they are not supposed to go into other classrooms. And so a lot of it is the repetitions of the expectations on a daily basis, just before the activity is supposed to occur, and then in terms of consequences a big piece of it is reminding – as they’re cuing the kid about what sort of behaviour they’re expecting they remind them of what the consequences will be if they choose not to conform with whatever the expectations are for that period. So a lot of it is an initial introduction and then ongoing reminders to the kids of what the rules are and what the consequences are. And also what they stand to earn when they follow all of the rules, and making the rewards very visible. And – because a lot of kids, particularly who struggle with their behaviour, sometimes they don’t even see what they could earn, because they’re put in a unit, and the good kids are put in a different unit, and so making sure that all of those things are visible to all kids so they realise those things are achievable to them.

And to return to the topic of isolation, you’ve made some comments in your précis about how isolation is best used or more appropriate. In your opinion and experience, what is the appropriate use of isolation in a juvenile detention setting?---The way I describe it is that it is used in response to an immediate threat to somebody’s safety. So not when a kid is just mouthing off at the staff, but when the kid is agitated, when they’re escalated, when they’re threatening violence or just after a violent incident has occurred. So that’s the first piece, is that the threshold has to be that there’s some imminent harm. The other piece is that the duration needs to be based on the kid’s behaviour and the kid’s readiness to return to the living unit safely, and that’s going to vary for kids. There’s no set time period that’s a magic number. But, rather, that that assessment needs to be done via interaction with staff to talk about, “What happened, what triggered you, what skills could you have used, what got in the way of using those skills when whenever it was happened, and how are you going to respond the next time you see that kid or staff or whatever it was that upset you?” And through that kind of assessment, the staff get a sense of whether the kid can safely be returned. And that could be within 20 minutes or for some kids who calm down more slowly, it could be a couple of hours. But seeing a kid in isolation for more than, say, four hours, raises some flags for me, that a kid can’t get deescalated in that period of time and I would hope that mental health folks have been called to assist in those situations.


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And - - -?---So it’s definitely – it’s a very important security and safety tool for staff to have in the immediate aftermath of violence, but I absolutely do not think it is an appropriate to use it as a consequence way after the fact. Like, “You got in a fight, so you get five days of isolation.” So that’s a really important distinction.

And what type of interventions might occur for a child while they’re in isolation? I mean, are they simply – would you recommend they simply be left alone or are there particular interventions that staff or others might perform?---It depends on the kid. That – some kids need to be left alone for some period of time, and they’re not ready to process with staff right away. Some kids like to talk through it. I’ve seen in other facilities lately – they didn’t have this in Ohio at the time, but some other facilities have developed kind of sensory rooms, and they work with occupational therapists around things to touch or feel or hear, and ways to express what’s going on with them through the physical feelings in their body. I don’t know of any research on that, but I’ve seen – there has been a lot of occupational therapy coming into justice facilities and I have seen that being used now as a tool to help kids calm down.

Can I shift to discussing the process of staff buy in to the reforms in Ohio. You mentioned that in your précis that leadership was critical in Ohio. Could you please explain how leadership was critical to ensure staff buy in to the process of reform?---The first thing they did was to be present in the facilities. Here in the US it is not uncommon for the agency leaders and the folks that work at headquarters to never go to the facilities. And there’s an instant kind of credibility loss with the line staff when they think that the folks at headquarters don’t understand their job, have never worked in their shoes, don’t reach out to find out what their experience is. And so Ohio is very good about making those at the top level of the agency come to the facility and really interact with staff. They did town hall meetings, they would go to shift briefings, they would just walk around the facilities and ask folks how it was going, they would respond to major incidents that happened. And so they had a real presence in the facility. And once folks started to know them and see that they had an interest in the line staff’s experience, they were better able to start selling some of the new things that they wanted to do. And they started doing that with a real strong foundation in data. They talked about the use of seclusion. And this was all over the press and, you know, the court case and the state inspector. So it was not a surprise to anybody that this was on their minds, but they started quantifying what that looks like. So, you know, “What is – we have 50,000 hours of seclusion this month. What does that real look like? What does that mean? Does that mean individual kids? What’s the impact on staff?” So they started really quantifying the problem. And then they started – and they presented the research, which also line staff don’t often have access to. They have time to read academic research, they don’t know where to find it, it’s not interesting. I even have a hard time getting through it, sometimes. So they broke that down to a real accessible way about why seclusion doesn’t lead to safety, what happens to kids when they’re in that setting, how does it create more anxiety and frustration and anger. And they brought that and made that accessible to the line staff. Then they said that they were going to be very conscientious about tracking the impact on the impact on use of isolation, and what happened with the violence rates. The staff were very concerned that it would lead to constant violence


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among the kids and constant assaults on staff because, in their mind, they weren’t totally sure that there were going to be consequences. So this is going along with what we talked about earlier, with the treatment teams implementing the consequences and how to get the staff ..... so very frequently they would go to the facilities and give updates. “This month our seclusion hours were this and our rates of violence were that.” And so they tied those two things together in a really compelling way. And so eventually – and it didn’t happen right away, but eventually as the seclusion hours went down, the violence also started going down, and then they had the hook in with the staff and staff started to see the results of the process that they were doing, the programming, the different focus on treatment, and all of these things started coming together in a real meaningful way. But it took the headquarter staff really making an effort to get that information in the hands of the line staff in order to sell it.

And did it also involve making mistakes and learning from those and have you – and - - -?---Yes.

What were some of the key, say, failings along the process that needed to be learned from?---One of the things that happened as we were designing the process around using isolation only for that de-escalation in the face of an imminent threat that I talked about, we knew that we wanted to have some sort of processing going on with the kid, just for them to talk about what happened and how they felt about it. And originally – and we knew that we wanted someone who hadn’t been involved in the incident itself to have that conversation. Originally we had the – kind of a mid-level uniform staff. That turned out to be a terrible idea, because that person had so many of their responsibilities that they couldn’t respond to the scene of a kid getting in isolation quickly enough, and the kid might languish in there for an hour or two just because that staff person had other equally essential duties. So we changed that to being the social workers, who were more accessible, who were more able to respond on a more immediate basis. Another thing that happened early on was, with the point in level system, they didn’t get the schedule of rewards right – right away. At first, the kids could only get something, I think at the end of the month, if they had achieved a certain level of points. And just – that wasn’t at all working for the kids who have much more immediate needs for reinforcement. And so we revised it so that kids got a daily reward if they got, I believe, 75 or 80 per cent of the points for that day, they would get some sort of daily reward at the end of the day. It was either a snack, or a movie, or something like that. And then we also created an interim reward schedule for a weekly reward. And then it kicked into the monthly. So doing that we were able to engage kids who aren’t as patient, aren’t as forward thinking, which as we know about adolescence is – that’s the homework of adolescents, right, that they’re not patient. So they getting those things properly calibrated and getting the right people – the right people doing the processes, sometimes that takes some trial and error.

And my final question on staffing: what type of recruitment processes need to exist to ensure you get the right staff who understand that shift in philosophy?---Well, I think the job description needs to be very clear. In Ohio, for a few years after the


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reforms started, the staff were still called juvenile correction officers, which means a certain thing: that you are going to be essentially supervising people who are incarcerated. It doesn’t talk at all about the level of engagement, the relationship building, the treatment work, and all of those things that we were expecting in this new vision of what those staff would do. So a few years into it they aligned it, they renamed the position youth specialist. And the job description really talked about what the daily expectations were, because some of the veteran staff were not pleased with this change. This was not what they signed on for, they did not want to be this interactive with the kids, and ..... realised that to attract a different kind of staff they needed to advertise for a different kind of staff. They looked for folks who had experience in child serving fields, whether it was psychology or school or having worked as a coach, or just liking kids and just being involved with them, and really their willingness to learn what the research said about the treatment of incarcerated kids and what kinds of things those kids needed. So it had to be a deliberate and thoughtful and very intentional scan of the labour pool to figure out who would be appropriate for this new position, this new vision and way of working with kids.

What did Ohio do with those veteran staff who weren’t buying into the philosophy?---Well, they offered them retraining to see if they could simply become more interested in the position once they had the tools, and that worked for a lot of people. Some people left on their own. And then some – Ohio also has a lot of competition from the adult system, which tends to pay a little bit better and doesn’t have the same requirements for how they work with the inmates. So a lot of people transferred to the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. And then, unfortunately, there were some staff who violated new policies and the new way of doing this and ended up leaving as a result of some kind of disciplinary measure.

By the time your term as court monitor ended in 2015 there was some preliminary data that suggested that a number of formal program evaluations found that youth who were diverted from detention had lower recidivism rates, less school interruption, more family engagement in treatment and better behavioural – health outcomes, and that lower population in detention helped decrease incidents of violence, and one cost/benefit analysis suggested for every dollar spent on reform the state saved between 11 and $45 in confinement and recidivism costs. Are these outcomes consistent with your experience of reform across a number of jurisdictions?---Ohio was lucky in that they had a bunch of researchers who were interested in doing that kind of complex study, and it doesn’t happen in most of the places I work, unfortunately. They see better outcomes within the facility, but they often don’t know what happened to the kids after they leave. There are other states that have more of a priority on research, like Washington State here. They tend to do more of that kind of analysis. But Ohio is a very unique in its commitment to looking at what happens after the kid leaves the facility. And, unfortunately, most of the places I work do not do that.

And do you think that’s an important part of the research task of a jurisdiction?---Absolutely, because I think that we need to know what works and how to recreate those conditions as we think about realigning facilities. There is


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some research here on the Pathways to Desistance, with Ed Mulvey, that talk about what the kids’ experience in the facility is and how that impacted what happened to them later. So I think it’s just essential for us to form what we know about best practices in the facility.

My final topic is the role of oversight mechanisms. And how important was it to have independent oversight in the form of yourself and another court monitor in Ohio to ensure the momentum of reform continued over a seven to nine year period?---Well there’s different forms, as you know, and we were involved in the kind of oversight that has probably a bigger hammer than the other forms. Ohio had a correctional inspection committee, who ostensibly had the authority to look at the same things we did, but they didn’t have the same authority that we did to really push towards compliance, to push towards reform. Really, they were sort of shining a light on conditions – which is extremely important, but it relies on motivated administrators to really make those changes. So ours was a particularly – we have a lot of access, we had a terrific judge who really held the jurisdiction’s feet to the fire. And, at the end of the case, we had some agency administrators who were very motivated to reform the Ddepartment. And so different types of oversight can work, but all of those things around authority and access and who the administrators are and what their motivation is, they all really need to come together in order for changes to be made.

And, as I mentioned earlier, you have expertise in the development of internal quality assurance units for juvenile detention centres. What are the key ingredients to a successful functioning quality assurance unit?---Well, I think first they have to have a comprehensive set of standards that are – clearly articulate what the performance expectations are in every area of the facility’s functioning. And then they need to have a set of quality assurance specialists who have subject matter expertise in each area. Whoever is doing the medical quality assurance audit needs to be a medical professional, whoever is doing the kind of facility operation, violence reduction use of force, needs to be an expert in that, otherwise they have no credibility with the staff. And the staff’s buy in to those results of the internal quality assurance are really key to anything ever changing. So you need to have standards, you need to have qualified staff, and I think you need to have a direct reporting to the agency administrator. Sometimes I’ve seen them – the quality assurance unit be too far embedded in the agency operations, and by the time the information gets filtered up to the top it has been diluted and distorted and maybe misunderstood and misrepresented, and so having a direct line to the top of the agency is really important to make sure the information is communicated clearly and that the facilities see that the agency takes quality assurance seriously and that they are meant to respond to the deficiencies that quality assurance finds. I see a lot of quality assurance reports that the administrator either doesn’t read it or just – you know, disregards it as soon as it hits their desk.

And how important – you mentioned grievance mechanisms earlier, how important is it to have a complaints mechanism for juveniles in detention as part of a quality assurance system?---It’s really important, although it can come in different forms. It


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can come in the traditional grievance where the kid writes down what their concern is, confidentially submits it. The grievance coordinator picks it up and responds to the kid. That’s the traditional kind, but I have seen other places where they can do a direct communication with the facility administrator. Lots of places have youth advocates that hold kind of town hall meetings with kids as a place to voice their concerns. There’s external ombudsmans, like the state of Texas has one of those. So there’s different mechanisms. But certainly giving the kids a voice where they can express their concerns, and also comment on the extent to which new programs and new procedures are of interest to them, would be compelling to them. I think that too often we leave the kids out of those decisions and we really lose something when we do that.

One issue, of course, that arises in the Northern Territory is the overrepresentation of Aboriginal youth, native young people in detention centres. On any given day, 90 to 100 per cent of young people in detention in the Northern Territory are Aboriginal. You’ve worked across a number of jurisdictions with racial disparities. Can you make a comment on how some of the jurisdictions you’ve worked in have dealt with those disparities?---For a long time, facilities wanted to absolve themselves from any responsibility in dealing with that issue. They would say, “We get who we get, the police pick up who they pick up,” or, “The prosecutor prosecutes whoever they’re going to,” and we just get them. But I think slowly we’re coming to recognise that there are a lot of decision points within the facility where disparities occur that have everything to do with the kids’ success post-release. For instance we see – in Ohio there was a big question about the racial disparities in the mental health units, that they were all white kids, and the youth of colour were mostly in the disciplinary units, often for behaviour that looked similar. And we see that in other places too, that kids – white kids may have more access to home passes, and if you drill down into why that is, it’s not an overt bias on the part of the staff, but the things that are required for a home pass are more difficult to accomplish in certain neighbourhoods. Maybe they’re not easy to get to, the staff who are doing the assessment of the home aren’t comfortable in those neighbourhoods, and so what we advise people to do is identify what the decision points are. Look to see if there is a disparity there and then start drilling into why that might be, sort of peeling the onion back about why each thing is occurring, to really get to the root of the problem. Very rarely have I ever found that it’s the result of an overt bias. There’s something else that’s going on that’s creating a disparity and is equally important to address as an overt bias would be, because we want to make sure that the system – that all kids have the potential for positive outcomes, and there aren’t these kind of structural barriers to them achieving or getting access to certain things, but I would say that that’s a pretty new – within the last three or four years in this country, that facilities have really been taking responsibility for that kind of analysis.

My final question is this: you’ve worked across numerous diverse jurisdictions and you’ve often mentioned in your answers the different approaches that might yet still lead to positive outcomes that jurisdictions have taken. Can you comment on whether there are certain principles of reform that are at least universal and are needed to found successful reform?---Well, I think safety is the biggest thing. Safety


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for both kids and staff, and that is very hard to achieve. Most of the court cases that I’ve been involved in have been about that core issue, and providing the treatment services or the medical services or the education that’s going to lead to better outcomes. None of that can happen unless the safety concerns are addressed. And so, certainly across the country, there are practices around the use of restraint, around the use of isolation, and kind of the training and the approach of staff and being grounded in relationship development. And those seem to be kind of the cornerstones of safe facilities where then you can build on those other services where positive outcomes happen.

Thank you. Commissioners, those are my questions.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Yes, thank you. Dr Dedel, we think that it has been a very thorough questioning of you by counsel, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that we’ve left to explore with you. We are very grateful for the trouble that you’ve taken to prepare your précis and to spend some time with us here in Darwin. There are many issues that you raise, of course, which are issues that confront us in our inquiry. And we will be able to use a lot of the information you’ve given us when we consider our report. Thank you very much for joining us today?---Thank you for having me. It was a real pleasure.

<THE WITNESS WITHDREW [10.13 am]

MR GOODWIN: Commissioners, we have another video link to establish. It might be appropriate – I’m in your hands, but it might be appropriate to take a short five minute adjournment.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: We will do that, certainly.

MR GOODWIN: Thank you.

ADJOURNED [10.13 am]

RESUMED [10.23 am]

MR CALLAGHAN: If it please the Commission I call Dr Elizabeth Grant and Dr Rohan Lulham. Dr Grant you can see is with us. Dr Lulham is on the screen.

<ELIZABETH GRANT, AFFIRMED [10.24 am]

.ROYAL COMMISSION 29.6.17 P-5294 E. GRANT ©Commonwealth of Australia

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<ROHAN LULHAM, AFFIRMED [10.24 am]

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Thank you. Mr Callaghan.

MR CALLAGHAN: Dr Lulham for the record, your full name?

DR LULHAM: Rohan Alfred Lulham.

MR CALLAGHAN: You are a research fellow at the Designing Out Crime Research Centre at the University of Technology Sydney?

DR LULHAM: Yes.

MR CALLAGHAN: And you’ve provided a précis of evidence that you signed on 22 May 2017, annexed to that précis are a number of other documents; is that correct?

DR LULHAM: Yes.

MR CALLAGHAN: I tender Dr Lulham’s précis and annexures.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Exhibit 633.

EXHIBIT #633 PRÉCIS OF EVIDENCE AND ANNEXURES OF DR LULHAM DATED 22/05/2017

MR CALLAGHAN: Dr Grant, for the record, your full name.

DR GRANT: Elizabeth Marie Grant.

MR CALLAGHAN: You are an architectural anthropologist and senior research fellow at the University of Adelaide?

DR GRANT: Yes.

MR CALLAGHAN: And you too have provided a précis of evidence to the Commission, you signed on 17 June and similarly there are annexures to that précis.

DR GRANT: Yes.

MR CALLAGHAN: I tender the précis from Dr Grant and annexures.


.ROYAL COMMISSION 29.6.17 P-5295 GRANT/LULHAM ©Commonwealth of Australia

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EXHIBIT #634 PRÉCIS OF EVIDENCE AND ANNEXURES OF DR GRANT DATED 17/06/2017

MR CALLAGHAN: Dr Lulham and Dr Grant, I propose to direct specific questions to each of you, but then get a comment perhaps from the other on the answers, if we can adopt that sort of format. And we have, as Dr Grant is at least aware, lost a bit of time this morning. So we have to cover a fair area of scholarship in that period. Can I begin, Dr Grant, with what might seem a deceptively simple question: why does the architectural aspect of a corrections facility matter?

DR GRANT: I think that’s deceptively simple, but in fact incredibly complex. I think the first one is that you need to understand that for every perpetrator there are victims, and there’s an expectation from the public that you deal with those victims, with the perpetrators of those crimes. There’s people out there - - -

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Could I ask you to speak up a little, Dr Grant.

DR GRANT: Certainly.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Thank you. I am really thinking about the audio for those who listen remotely, it’s always a little bit quiet if the witness is – I can hear you alright, but they may not, thank you.

DR GRANT: So the last sanction of our courts at the moment is prisons, and what we need to realise, I guess, in this circumstance where we have got juveniles in detention is that almost every member of the public expects some sort of punishment, especially those who have been victims, and quite often that punishment is lock them up and throw away the key. But what I would suggest, and what all of the research shows, is that taking that sort of approach is possibly the most short-sighted approach of all. And, in fact, the architecture of the prison is very, very important. What we really need to create is future citizens while they are – if indeed they do need to be locked up.

And that is a very hard pill for most members of the public, especially those who have been victims, to take. And what we need to understand is that taking a soft approach to architecture and creating something that’s humane, safe, is going to be in almost all instances more cost effective and not create a cycle of offending.

MR CALLAGHAN: Quite understandably, the essence of that answer is directed towards perhaps the impact of the architecture on the detainees, and I suspect most of the dialogue this morning will have that focus. But, Dr Lulham, just at the outset you’ve conducted research on how prison architecture affects guards and other participants in the system, and indeed if we could go to your statement at paragraph 16, and even to annexure 3 of your statement – perhaps we could get that up on the screen – because in annexure 3, you have included some images there, and indeed allude to the Stanford prison experiment to which you make reference in paragraph


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16. And it might be a lead in to just have some thoughts about the impact of staff about the situational context in which they work.

DR LULHAM: Yes. So I conducted research – it was my doctoral research on juvenile detention centres, and specifically the impact of design. The three images in figure 1 ..... they’re the three different juvenile justice settings that participants ..... and that included a really startling finding from this, with regards to staff, was in – they needed to ..... detainees and staff in each of these environments. And both staff and detainees perceived other detainees in the same way. So in the first – the top image, they were really bad, really hard and really active. In the second image, which was the most normalised, they were perceived as good, less hard, and less active.

And, in the third image, it was in between those. So – and that was sort of startling that they perceived the environment and the effect on people similarly. That – putting that together with the Stanford prison evidence, so that was – you know, it’s quite a famous piece of research, and one of the main sort of findings from that was the effect of the situational environment on people. That experiment was set up so undergraduates were randomly assigned to each position, either staff or inmate, and they found within that that the situational environment, including the physical environment, set up a set of expectations that led to, you know, within a day the staff being brutal and the inmates, in their sort of roles, being helpless and not be able to react or stand up at all.

So it was a really strong sort of demonstration of that – that phenomenon. It has sort of been researched further and it’s sort of called the fundamental attribution error. But, yeah ..... the startling - - -

MR CALLAGHAN: And you speak about the fundamental attribution error, we might just define that. Is it the concept that when you are attributing causes to poor behaviour by inmates, most people overemphasise the inmate’s personal characteristics and significantly underestimate the environment or their situational context.

DR LULHAM: Yeah – yes, and the dynamic when – you know, one of those parties is in a position of authority, that becomes a really dangerous dynamic that can, you know, spiral down into these behaviours.

MR CALLAGHAN: And the other point about Stanford is that, we are reminded by the image that you’ve included, that it’s 44 years ago. So presumably there’s quite a body of research and learning that you’ve reviewed in the course of your research to come to the conclusions that you’ve shared with us?

DR LULHAM: Yeah – yep. So Abu Ghraib was sort of seen as another – prison in Iraq, so one of the US prisons, is seen as another incarnation of that, where the situational environment led to these abuses.


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MR CALLAGHAN: And the point you make in your précis is that Correctional facilities based on a residential design approach are associated with more positive experiences than the ones that we have been talking about; is that right?

DR LULHAM: Yes. And so detainees perceive staff as significantly more positive in those environments. And that was a study that was done in a way that controlled for any other differences. So it was only the influence of the physical setting and they perceived them significantly - - -

MR CALLAGHAN: Alright. Well, thank you, we can lose that image. Dr Grant, when we’re talking about the impact of the physical setting and the design of correctional facilities in this inquiry, we are particularly interested in the work that you’ve done on the design of correctional facilities for Indigenous people, and certainly one concern from those representing the interests of people in Central Australia is that it should be understood that a culturally safe space is more than just having an outside area.

DR GRANT: Absolutely.

MR CALLAGHAN: Can you just tell us, if you can, what sort of features should secure accommodation for a majority Aboriginal youth population have?

DR GRANT: I don’t think you can actually just say it must have an outside space, or it must have a cultural space, or it must have any of those other things. This is actually a really complex design issue that each one has to be delivered and worked with the language group involved. For example, in working with West Kimberley Regional Prison, and in fact in any other regional prison, one would look with the – with the – with the language groups. And I just want to give you – perhaps if – could I flick on to some slides first of all, or would you prefer to save those?

MR CALLAGHAN: I would prefer to see how we go for time and we can review those at the end if we have them, because we will have the images.

DR GRANT: Yeah.

MR CALLAGHAN: Are there some in particular that you need to - - -

DR GRANT: I think it would be actually quite a lot easier just to flick those on.

MR CALLAGHAN: Alright. If that’s possible.

DR GRANT: Perhaps the second set of slides, which is actually a kindergarten.

MR CALLAGHAN: Alright. Can you just pause for a moment, and we will see - - -

DR GRANT: And I would - - -


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MR CALLAGHAN: Just pause for a moment. We will see if we can get that, so we can – this is - - -

DR GRANT: So this is actually – in the same way that you design a prison for Aboriginal people, this is actually a children and family centre. The state wanted to put a transportable there, and the Aboriginal community decided to get specialists, so we just flick to the next one. It’s located in Christies Beach, which is a lower socioeconomic area of Adelaide with a high Aboriginal population. Just flick to the next one. So this is – they came up with a design for this and, in terms of designing a prison, you need to get the elders, the users and all of the people on track design a piece of Aboriginal architecture. And you can see this one faces on to the back of a school, so that the kids could become familiar with that school environment.

And as a result, there has been 70 per cent more increases of enrolments. We just flick through to the next one. So that’s actually a welcoming environment. And what they found in that area was that nobody, no parents or no Aboriginal parents took their kids to kindy. We designed – they have an area which has got Aboriginal motifs which are related to the reclamation of language. Next one through. And it was a very interesting one, because they decided that they wanted youth offenders on the site, and so we had to work out a way of designing this site for youth offenders and for kindergarten children on a particular language group and to replicate cultural references.

Flick to the next one. You can see there’s a children’s site on one side. Next one. With the cultural references including – that’s Kondili, the whale there. They wanted their references because of their belief the increased knowledge of culture and cultural stories would increase the resilience and strength of their children, and in the background is the community room which acts as a community room for the community and also for youth offender programs. Can we just flick through to the next one. That’s the children’s space and, again, we found ways ..... to break rules which kept different groups of children apart. Through to the next one. With long-range views, which would be another point.

So this is on country, it has wrong-range views, it has appropriate signs and symbols, it has appropriate input of the community. And just pop through the next one. It has internal and external space from all the rooms. And through to the next one, which is an awful picture, but the next one after this shows you what it looks like afterwards. One more. Is that this community space was possibly the most important part: was that under all circumstances whether it be youth detention centre, a kindergarten, a hospital, that country and kin are the basis of architectural design for Aboriginal people.

MR CALLAGHAN: Okay. Dr Lulham, do you have anything to add about the features that you would suggest secure accommodation for Aboriginal youth should have?


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DR LULHAM: I think I would defer to Elizabeth and her expertise. We have been involved in one project where those ..... embedding the Indigenous aspects, I suppose, but also embedding the practices as the artefacts as well. So how the – we looked at a learning centre. So it was about designing that around the Indigenous ways of learning, sort of moving together, going off as individuals, and then coming back. And that was quite a powerful sort of design approach in that context. And it worked for everyone.

MR CALLAGHAN: Alright. Well, talking about things that work for everyone, can you speak to the concept of a detention centre being constructed around the notion of small scale therapeutic home-based surroundings?

DR LULHAM: Yes, I mean basically you would be taking references and designing in those sort of practices how, in the community, people eat, how they relax in their homes, how they sleep, and trying to replicate those as much as possible. And in those ways, influencing both – you know, both staff behaviour and inmate behaviour. I mean, it’s – it is relevant in this context but, for example, McDonald’s uses it in a lot of their designs. They use as sort of residential approach, but part of that is to get – you know, to have this calmer atmosphere where people behaviour in sort of concert with a residential approach. So there’s that – there’s that that sort of general theory about that. But it all - - -

DR GRANT: Can I just interject.

MR CALLAGHAN: Sorry, finish, Dr Lulham. I will throw to Dr Grant in a moment.

DR LULHAM: Yeah. I mean, but I suppose more broadly about why design matters in architecture is that it embeds a sort of philosophy of that institution. It embeds staff behaviours, it embeds experiences, and so that – in thinking about a new facility, you need to think about what behaviours you want to embed in that facility.

MR CALLAGHAN: Indeed, if you were to - - -

DR LULHAM: And there’s a - - -

MR CALLAGHAN: Sorry, finish that point.

DR LULHAM: No, you’re right.

MR CALLAGHAN: If we were to distil at least one core message from your statement, or from your précis, it would be that design embeds philosophy; would that be a fair comment?

DR LULHAM: Yeah, totally.


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MR CALLAGHAN: And sorry, Dr Grant, had you a point to make.

DR GRANT: I wanted to add a point in to what Rohan said and it is fairly easy to replicate what Aboriginal communities want and need for young people. And you know, for example at West Kimberley Regional Prison, there’s an opportunity for prisoners to sleep inside or outside, because we had a group of Kimberley men and women who were pursuing traditional life styles. So that was designed into that.

MR CALLAGHAN: But that’s a good example where your point is that even a good model shouldn’t be adopted uncritically.

DR GRANT: Absolutely not.

MR CALLAGHAN: Because that might not work somewhere else.

DR GRANT: Yes. I think it’s important, and every opportunity comes to take a look at this, and to design for Aboriginal people – especially in the prison context – is very important to take every user group separately. This are not – this is not one user group that goes across Australia, and we know very little about this Northern Territory user group.

MR CALLAGHAN: Again, a fairly short simple message but nonetheless a powerful one. Can I ask you this: together with Dr Lulham and Professor Naylor, you recently co-authored an article relating to the use of segregation and isolation for children. Perhaps you could just tell us about the harms caused by isolation.

DR GRANT: They’re endless. And it’s – it really is a counterproductive – it is absolutely - - -

MR CALLAGHAN: You may be looking for paragraph 32, I’m not sure.

DR GRANT: Thank you very much ..... that would be very useful. It’s psychologically damaging. It causes long term damages which prisoners will not, in some instances, recover from. It causes long-term psychological issues that prisoners and other people who are held in isolation may not recover from. There is a dearth of literature, which goes back to the 1950s, which says in one word: do not do this under any circumstance. And I think I’ve outlined that literature - - -

MR CALLAGHAN: You have.

DR GRANT: - - - enough in this. This is a very, very dangerous practice. Across the world people are trying to prohibit it, and it is a dangerous practice both for behaviour management and for suicide as a suicide prevention tool.

MR CALLAGHAN: Dr Lulham, anything to add to that?


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DR LULHAM: Yeah. I think it’s exactly what Elizabeth was saying and it’s – it also requires that new approaches are taken to managing difficult behaviour and those approaches aren’t – yeah, confinement rooms or solitary rooms; that there needs to be other ways that staff manage that behaviour and address need. And that needs to be thought about really well: how is that going to happen and how is the environment going to support that in a positive way?

MR CALLAGHAN: And one thing I don’t want to run out of time for, so I’m going to switch to now, is the fact you’ve both been provided with a copy of the document that the Northern Territory Government has given to the Commission entitled the New Darwin Youth Detention Centre Outline Design Brief. Commissioners, I’m going to ask the witnesses to both address comments to this document, so it might be convenient if I tendered it now.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Yes, thanks, Mr Callaghan. That’s exhibit – sorry, 635.

EXHIBIT #635 NEW DARWIN YOUTH DETENTION CENTRE OUTLINE DESIGN BRIEF

MR CALLAGHAN: Dr Grant, I might begin with you. Perhaps first by way of general observation - - -

DR GRANT: By general observation, this is a very poorly researched and prepared brief. One of the most poorly and researched briefs I’ve ever seen. The first part of it is that it is meant to be based on human rights legislation and, unfortunately, they’ve quoted outdated legislation. They’ve quoted the Standard Minimum Rules for Prisoners 1955 which, as many lawyers in this room would be aware, were replaced by the Mandela Rules of 2015. And I will leave it to Ssenior Ccounsel to go through those and to note that, in fact, the brief took none of those amendments into it. I’ve tendered an addendum that goes into that in some detail.

MR CALLAGHAN: I might tender that now too. You have prepared a précis.

DR GRANT: I have.

MR CALLAGHAN: I mean, I’m asking you for general observations, with a few minutes .....

DR GRANT: Well, that was – well, that would be the first one I would go and I know that we are short of time.

MR CALLAGHAN: Dr Grant has prepared a précis dated 22 June 2017. I might tender that and doctor, if you feel the need to refer to that now, it’s in evidence. So it will be as soon as - - -


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DR GRANT: Okay. So - - -

MR CALLAGHAN: Just one moment. It will be as soon as - - -

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Will be exhibit 636. Thank you.

EXHIBIT #636 PRÉCIS OF EVIDENCE OF DR GRANT DATED 22/06/2017

DR GRANT: So that’s my first part and I’ve actually tendered in the Mandela Rules changes and in fact the Mandela Rules themselves just to show of those. So that is the first part of it. The second part that is very problematic is the vision statement, and it has five parts of it. It says:

The facility must be secure. The facility should have a campus like feel. Provide a safer environment which minimises potential harm. Opportunities for rehabilitation and new lifestyle and reintegration back into the community. An environment that recognises a response to the gender and cultural and individual needs of young children in detention and particular consideration to health, mental health programs and services.

What I see from that is a vision statement where, in no way, does it actually talk about the design of the facility for young people. And when I would be considering a brief, or looking at a brief, I would be looking at the users and what we want for those users in the first instance. I mean, for example, a – the first vision would not be “a facility should be secure”. It would be something like, “The design of this facility should recognise and promote the role of young offenders as future citizens.” And I think that’s a really critical problem in that they have not looked at both those minimum standards as the Mandela Rules or the instruments behind the other standards which guide the design of units.

The next thing I would like to know is that these were actually designed – they were produced by the Victorian government in 1996 and this would be the third point. I didn’t – after I read the vision statement at that point, I didn’t go into the detail about the air conditioning or anything else. That was the point to which I stopped, because it became evidently clear. But these are guidelines which were taken from a Victorian brief, which is – which is problematic. You don’t take a prison or a piece of architect designed for Victoria and plonk it in the Northern Territory. It has actually been done before. When Fannie Bay jail rocked over, they took a brief and constructed Darwin Correctional centre, the old one. It was a critical mistake.

It also happened down in Tasmania when the old Risdon jail, for anyone who remembers it, was a cold, icy cold place, was a jail that was actually designed, I think, for California. And I put a reference in a note. This is the worst way to approach architecture that I can see: a value set that doesn’t think, legislation that


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isn’t relevant, and hence that’s where I think I would conclude my evaluation of the brief.

MR CALLAGHAN: Thank you. And we do have the benefit of your written assessment. Dr Lulham, we don’t have anything in writing from you so I would be interested for you to articulate for us, if you could, whether this establishes a set of design principles for a fit-for-purpose Darwin youth detention facility.

DR LULHAM: Yeah. In terms of design principles, I don’t think in any way it does that. I think it’s a technical document. Some of it – of scoping that out for a typical place, which is very generic, maybe. But I think the vision statement was problematic for me as well, and even that first statement, “To assist young people to reduce their likelihood of offending by strengthening”, it just – it seemed a harsh way. And then more:

Improved integration with family and community whilst holding them accountable for their offending behaviour.

And that, for me – in light of the difficulties that they have had in the Northern Territory and other places, that statement of “holding them accountable for their offending behaviour”, my view of that, maybe it’s not correct, but the court – is that’s the court’s role, and the role of custody and a detention centre would be to hold them in secure care. But it’s not Mandela Rules, any of the other rules will say it’s not the facility’s role to punish or to, you know, hold them accountable. Which I think accountable and punish can slide very quickly in the minds of staff and management. So, you know, that was the red flag for me.

MR CALLAGHAN: What, if anything, did you infer about the level of consultation underpinning the document?

DR LULHAM: Yes. I thought – my sense is, if you’re building a new detention centre, you need the staff and management to really own and lead that, and the community. So – and there’s no evidence within this document that people were consulted and that there was a view of how we’re going to have a new detention centre that sits, sort of well within the community, and does good things for the community in that, you know, bringing these young people back in a way that they’re – yeah, they’re able to be citizens. So, yes, I – mean, that – you need people to own this and lead it and I felt like this was a consultant’s report. It wasn’t – there was no voice of the Government in there of how they were going to, sort of, envision this better place.

MR CALLAGHAN: Alright. Well, how – if you are going to build a new secure accommodation for youth in the Northern Territory, first to you, to continue on with that, how should it be approached?

DR LULHAM: I think in terms of the vision statement and the values that you want, so – and that would be in terms of getting a range of stakeholders involved and


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going for a process of identifying what values you want to be embodied in that facility that will – and that they will give you a way of, for staff and for detainees, to understand what the purpose of this place is. And then from those values, starting to work down at, well, what behaviours support those. But it needs to be a wide ranging consultative process, where people – you know, you’re trying to get everyone to think they own and are part of the story.

And obviously in – you know, in the Northern Territory, it needs to have a really strong Indigenous – they need to own this facility and see it as something that is not destructive to their people.

MR CALLAGHAN: Dr Grant, on the topic of what you – or the matter of what the first steps should be in considering new accommodation is something that you’ve covered from A to Z, quite literally, in paragraph 26 – paragraph 24 of your first statement.

DR GRANT: And I would actually – I would actually like to make a – to make a point about that. First of all is that the Royal Commission has got the opportunity to set some values down here and to make a really innovative approach, and the amount of calls that I’ve had come from around the world, which says, “Please do that, because we’re all grappling with the same problems.” The – my expertise is in Indigenous architecture, I work for and with Indigenous communities to provide, instead of a transportable on the ground, a beautiful child care centre for the same price. And it would be my thought – or a prison or anything else – but it would be my thought that the Royal Commission has an option of setting some values down very, very specifically that about what this centre will be.

And then rather than to do what the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody did, which is to say just set a model, compare it to this model, is to actually appoint a task force. Because we know so little about these offenders. We know so little about what their families and their communities want. But one thing I do know is they’re soothing themselves with sex and booze and drugs, and we need the communities to own whatever centres or centres are going to be done. And I feel, as I’ve written in it that a task force should be set down to work out with the community. I worked on a similar project in master planning for the new Darwin Correctional Centre with Professor Paul Memmot and we went away and suggested that in fact a very small prison was built to that committee.

They rejected that, because many corrections staff at the time wanted to see their prisoners as dangerous. We wanted a small prison and work camps put around. It was a much more could have effective mechanism. Instead they put a very large prison in the middle of the jungle which very few Aboriginal families can get to, to meet – spend time with their family. Please don’t make the same mistake twice.

MR CALLAGHAN: And because our next witness is scheduled at an inflexible time, we are going to have to wrap this up, but before I let Dr Lulham have the final word is there anything you would like to add to that?


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DR GRANT: I think I’ve said enough in that and I, my reports say enough.

MR CALLAGHAN: They are comprehensive.

DR GRANT: Please, please, do some good work here.

MR CALLAGHAN: Thank you. Dr Lulham my last question to you before the Commissioners have any specific inquiries, do you wish to add to or comment on anything that was just said? Or anything else for that matter.

DR LULHAM: Yeah. One comment would be – and I suppose in the evidence that provided there’s a lot about, sort of, values and vision and leadership. And what – I think you can see that in the West Kimberley is an example, that they had a process of really identifying those values and principles, and what I’m trying to say is this is about design but designers can design around those. And that’s what powers design. So, yeah, they need to know what people want. In the absence of that information, you will get a meaningless place. So it’s really important that – that sort of vision aspect of it.

MR CALLAGHAN: That you have a philosophy before you draw up the design that embeds it?

DR LULHAM: Yes. Totally.

MR CALLAGHAN: Commissioners, as ever, there is so much more I could cover, but if there was anything in particular that you wished to ask of the witnesses, I think our time is drawing to a close.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Well, I think the précis are quite full and then the footnotes with the extra material that we have been able to have a look at is, of course, particularly helpful. And the obvious one is the design for an adult prison carries no assistance over into the design for a juvenile detention, I think is a very powerful one. So that we certainly, amongst other things, will take that away. And I don’t think there’s any need to develop that. So thank you, Dr Lulham, very much for coming to assist us in this important part of our work, and we’ve read your précis and materials carefully. And thank you, Dr Grant, for your assistance to us. We heed your cry. Thank you. We need now to terminate the connection so that we can hear from Judge Reynolds. Thank you very much.

MR CALLAGHAN: Thank you.

<THE WITNESSES WITHDREW [11.01 am]

MR CALLAGHAN: I might tender the PowerPoint presentations provided by Dr Grant.

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COMMISSIONER WHITE: Yes, thank you. Exhibit 637.

EXHIBIT #637 POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS PROVIDED BY DR GRANT

MR CALLAGHAN: Technology is in the hands of others. I’m not sure whether we are ready to switch to Judge Reynolds directly.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: I think we need a five minute adjournment, so we will do that. Thank you.


RESUMED [11.12 am]

MR CALLAGHAN: Commissioners, we have on the monitor his Honour Judge Reynolds from the Children’s Court of Western Australia, who is invited to address the Commission in his capacity as President of the Children’s Court of Western Australia.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Thanks, Mr Callaghan. Welcome, Jjudge. Thank you very much for joining us here in Darwin to tell us something about your experiences. Now, the other judicial officers who have appeared to give us the benefit of their advice and experience have taken oaths or affirmations according to their choice. Are you in the position to feel comfortable doing that?

JUDGE REYNOLDS: Yes, certainly. I’m happy to take the oath.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Thank you.

<DENIS REYNOLDS, SWORN [11.12 am]

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Thank you, Judge?---I thank you for accommodating me to give evidence by video link, it’s much appreciated.

We are just delighted that you can spare some time. It’s always hard, with judicial duties, to do that.

<EXAMINATION-IN-CHIEF BY MR CALLAGHAN [11.12 am]

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MR CALLAGHAN: Your Honour, you are Judge Dennis Reynolds, President of the Children’s Court of Western Australia?---Yes.

You have – there are a few topics upon which it is thought that the Commission can benefit from your experience and we begin with the notion of a specialist court. Now, as you are aware, the Commission has already heard from Judge Johnstone, Judge Shanahan and Hannam J, so the Commission has some sense of the concepts involved, but could I ask you first to speak to the Western Australian model and then to elaborate upon the reasons for a Children’s Court, a specialist Children’s Court, and the benefits of it?---Thank you for that. The Children’s Court in Western Australia is created pursuant to a separate Children’s Court Act of Western Australia. It has two jurisdictions, essentially, the criminal jurisdiction and also a civil jurisdiction which deals with care and protection. The structure within the court is to have a judge president. I am a judge of our District Court – by appointment of the Governor, a District Court judge is the president of the Children’s Court. Within the Children’s Court there are also magistrates. In Western Australia, I’m the only permanent judge in the Children’s Court, so I’m the president. And the court is structured so there – in Perth in Western Australia there are four full-time and one part-time magistrates, and I’m the judge. But we have jurisdiction right across the state. In the metropolitan area, we are a specialist Children’s Court, myself full-time and also those five magistrates full-time, only deal with Children’s Court matters. Across regional Western Australia, there are Magistrates Courts in the major towns, and the magistrate that would usually sit in that Magistrates Court also has a commission to convene a Children’s Court, but from time to time where there’s a particular case that requires our expertise I would send a magistrate to a regional centre. In relation to the more serious matters, I would go to a regional centre and deal with that. So the Children’s Court in Western Australia has exclusive jurisdiction in relation to children. So the president judge deals with criminal matters, including murder, and consistent with that the offence of aggravated armed robbery carries life imprisonment also. So the judge, myself as president, I have exclusive jurisdiction for all of the offences under the Criminal Code. That’s subject to two things. Firstly, a young person who is charged with an indictable offence, if the adult could elect to be dealt with by judge and jury, that young person would have that same right of election. There’s also a provision in the Children’s Court Act that if an adult is charged with a young person as well and the adult us to be tried in a superior court then there’s provision for that young person to join with the adult to be dealt with in a joint trial in the adult jurisdiction. It’s very rare indeed for a young person to elect to be dealt with by a judge and jury and so leave this jurisdiction. The other important point to mention is that the president, myself, I deal with reviews from sentences of magistrates. I also deal with bail applications. If a magistrate was to refuse bail, then it comes to me as a matter of right for me to have a look at it, and so I can review both sentence and bail decisions by magistrates. And that’s a relatively speedy process, so young people don’t have to go to our Supreme Court on appeal, whether it’s in relation to a sentence or a bail decision, so that means there’s speedy resolutions of those matters internally. That has a great advantage in that the president of the court, through internal judicial leadership and decision-making, can ensure that within the court itself there’s a sense of focus, the application of the


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objectives and principles for young people as set out in our Act. In relation to the reasons as to why a specialist court is a good thing – and I should say that merging, especially in the Magistrates Court level of the judiciary, of adults and children is simply not conducive to good outcomes for both children and also the community. But having a specialist court means that the Children’s Court has its own identity. It has specialist expertise in relation to children’s matters. For example, knowledge of the law, communicating with children. The court uniformly, and across all of its judicial officers, is acutely aware of the objectives and principles of youth justice. In particular, rehabilitation, the need for solution-based responses. The court, if there is a specialist court, is in a good position and lives and breathes, if I can put it that way, on a daily basis, case by case basis, balancing principles such as rehabilitation, protection of the community, and punishment, and in particular, of course, that of detention. Immediate detention is the sentence of last resort and, if necessary, then it starts with the shortest necessary time. So the Children’s Court has expertise, a sense of focus, consistency in decision-making. There’s no jumping from one jurisdiction to another. Can I say that I’ve conducted a sentencing program with magistrates across all jurisdictions, including the magistrates jurisdiction, providing sentencing problems. Undertaking that exercise was an incredibly diverse range of sentences imposed in relation to the same case by magistrates in the Magistrates Court. It simply sheeted home to me the need for a specialist court so you’ve got consistency in decision-making. Jumping from one jurisdiction to another, if you have a merging of adult and children’s matters, then you end up with excessive delay in children’s matters being dealt with. They join the queue, which includes adults. It’s particularly important that the Children’s Court, as best as possible, deal with matters for children as expeditiously as possible so they’re in and out of the court as quickly as possible. The other thing about a specialist Children’s Court is that it attaches to it, because it’s its own entity, ancillary agencies and services and personnel attached to them. For example, the Children’s Court here has a program which we call Links, that’s for the mental health of children we have psychiatric and psychologically qualified people that work with us, that can link young people to services in the community. That’s attached to the court, in the same building as the court in Perth. We have a Metropolitan Youth Bail Service, which is attached to the court, which is solely for the purpose of assisting young people on bail. And we have the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions in Perth that prosecutes in Children’s Court matter. They develop an expertise. And can I say in relation to the regions – no disrespect to police prosecutors intended – but having specialist lawyers, particularly in my court, prosecute matters involving children and their knowledge of the law and so capacity to negotiate outcomes where appropriate, I think, is a big advantage. The physical location and having our own building is particularly important as well, because we have the one court, because we house specialist services within the one building. Now, that’s in Perth, it’s not in country Western Australia, but I wish it was. So within our building we have youth justice services, mental health services, the DPP is located in the building, child protection, victim impact services. We have – and Legal Aid has its own office within our building. So we can have all of the services within the one building, so it’s essentially a one-stop-shop. The other thing about the court and the court’s expertise, so far as the judicial officers are concerned, that also extends to the registry. So we have people in our registry, each and every


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day, all day, they’re communicating with children, members of family with children and, as a result of that, they develop an expertise. And so the whole delivery of the service to children and young people and the community can be delivered much better. The other thing about it is, as president – they are essentially two roles as the president. Firstly, of course, going into court and making decisions, but secondly the president has the very important role, in my view, outside of court, to work with government agencies, work with non-government agencies, not-for-profits, to provide some leadership to give those agencies a good idea of the sorts of programs that the court is looking for, for children. And so generally there’s that judicial leadership with the government, non-government agencies, which I think is very important. And also I think there’s an important point to be made that if you have a single court with its own identity and a president that provides across the whole space some leadership and ensuring proper standards are applied when it comes to dealing with children. So I hope that gives you a bit of an overview.

It does, thank you. In the course of the answer, you mentioned or touched upon the expertise of other agencies, and I believe you may be able to tell us something about the way in which the police in Western Australia deal with youth related issues and particularly the concept of the youth crime intervention officer. That is a concept in which the Commission is interested, if you are able to tell us about that?---Just leading up to that comment, I’ve forwarded – and you no doubt have read – a presentation I gave about youth justice being a standalone agency. So I just make reference to that, without talking about it. but my view is that it’s very important that the police have a role, and also the nature of the role that they have is crucial in this space. I say that because the police, of all of the agencies involved in the space, youth justice, child protection, for example, the police are the only 24/7 agency in the space. So what’s happening at ground level is really in the face of the police. And the police really have, because of their position, the best intelligence. They’ve got so much information, and so it’s important that they are in the space. Now, over the last four, five years or so, to the police’s credit, they took the view that police work is not just about policing, charging, gathering evidence, and presenting it to a court. They took the view that in order to have the best effect on reducing offending they needed to get into, and work with, children and families and deal with the underlying causes of factors behind offending. So they set about, essentially, creating a youth division, as such – in a loose way, not in the same way as it is in New Zealand, but they introduced the position of a youth crime intervention officer. Now, the purpose of that role is to proactively engage with priority and prolific offenders and leverage partnerships, both government and non-government, for the provision of programs and services to young offenders. So the idea is to provide a holistic approach to facilitate better outcomes for young offenders in the community, which in turn reduces the demand on police services. So in Western Australia at the moment there are currently 52 youth crime intervention officers. Of that 52, there are 20 based in metropolitan Perth. There are 32 based in regional Western Australia. Between January 2016 and January 2017 the youth crime intention officers across the state worked with 226 young people. So that was broken up 104 in the metropolitan region of Perth and 122 in regional Western Australia. And this approach has had a significant – led to a significant reduction in offending, with the engaged youth. And


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when I say significant, it’s very much so: in the metropolitan area, Perth – and like lots of places, you can essentially divide it up into quadrants – one quadrant there was a reduction of 70 per cent across this cohort of engaged youth. Now, I should just say the 70 per cent, I won’t go into it, but by reference to the records that young people, the treatment, the regularity, and the nature of the offending, that’s past offending. And then – so you look at that and then you look at what offences, if any, that they commit over a period of time having become engaged with the youth crime intention officers. So that’s essentially how the statistic is gathered. For example, in central metro Perth there was a reduction of 70 per cent and in south metro Perth, 55 per cent. In regional Western Australia, for example, the Great Southern, that’s down near Albany, there was a reduction of 81 per cent. In the mid-west, 50 per cent. Pilbara and Kimberley and 33 and 19 per cent respectively. So you can see that this intervention has had great success. And, essentially, it’s a research-based approach where you look at the underlying causes, and the police go and work with children and also families. Now, is this is a great initiative. It’s my view that we also need to focus on creating the programs within community. Government agencies, but in particular not-for-profit organisations, support them in having the programs that the police can go to, to provide young people that they’re dealing with. Another advantage of this program, with the youth crime intervention officers, is that within the police itself you then start to have a group of people who are really champions, and within the police structure itself, champion the objectives and principles for youth justice. So it’s not just a matter of me, the court and others working with police to try and instil the objectives and principles for youth justice. You now have a group of people living and breathing the principles within their own organisation and championing the cause of children and families, which in turn benefits the community, and obviously police, because there’s less demand on police for their service.

Thank you. Judge, you referred a moment ago to a paper that you had sent us. That was a presentation paper dated 26 April 2017; is that correct?---I can’t recall the specific date, but that sounds about right.

This was a paper that you have delivered publicly; is that correct?---That’s correct.

So there’s no difficulty with us receiving that into evidence before the Commission?---No, that’s fine. I sent that to you on the basis that I delivered it publicly.

Yes. I tender the presentation paper delivered by his Honour Judge Reynolds.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Thank you, that paper can be exhibit 638.

EXHIBIT #638 PRESENTATION PAPER DELIVERED BY JUDGE REYNOLDS


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MR CALLAGHAN: And judge, the issue of the stand-alone agency to which you alluded is addressed in that paper, I believe; is that correct?---That’s right.

Yes. Commissioners, the paper is a wealth of information as indeed, of course, with respect is everything that his Honour has just said to us. But, in view of our time constrictions if there are any questions to which you wish to – now would be the time.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: I do have a question, Jjudge. A bit interested in how you administer youth justice when you go to the more remote communities in Western Australia. Could you just speak about whether it differs from the way it is dealt with in metropolitan Perth, for example, or indeed in the bigger centres?---Regrettably, the big difference is the resources that you have at your disposal. And also regrettably is the lack of programs, the lack of local community inclusion, in the responses. So as you go to the more remote communities there’s a real problem with the court visiting the community, but then not enough by way of support services and programs happening within the community itself. And so I think – it seems to me that the Northern Territory and Western Australia and West Australia, I’m looking at places within the Kimberley, the Pilbara, the Ggold fields, there’s a certain common thread that goes through: when you have those remote communities we really do need, prior to looking at the court, we really do need to have other agencies, in particular say the Department of Communities, going in there to capacity-build those communities. Because, as a court, what I would be looking for is solution-based responses within community, to hopefully be delivered by people within community, and the programs really are very specifically relevant to the community itself. So – I’m sorry, I’m not answering that question as well as maybe what you would like because we really don’t do that as well as I would like, and it’s very much a resource issue. The problem with Western Australia – and it could be a problem in the Northern Territory, I don’t know, and that is that Western Australia is – well, geographically very large but it’s also Perth-centric and there’s too much of fly in/fly out to various places rather than concentrate of capacity building within the particular locality itself. So you’ve got essentially local people being supported, empowered, given ownership of their own problems, and then taking charge of them and then working with the court. So, as best the court can, we work with youth justice, child protection, to try and ensure that there is some intervention. But the reality is, in a practical sense, is there’s just not enough day-to-day support for the children and families, and that’s where we really need to start looking at building community. And also giving those young people things to do during the day, providing them with necessary programs. Another serious issue in relation to remote communities relates to the children and their living circumstances. There are many children that come before the court, particularly in remote communities, who suffer from neurodevelopmental issues, impairments, that sort of thing. So another thing in relation to communities is that the court is very mindful, when it’s dealing with those young people, to get information in relation to the neurodevelopmental issues, the cognitive issues, the executive functioning issues, all of those things, in order to know, well, given the particular issues that the young person has, what is the best program for that young person and what is the best way


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in which that program is to be delivered to ensure that the young person can usefully engage in it? So we have all those challenges, just like the Northern Territory has, and we are, because of lack of resources, not doing it as well as we should.

Thank you Jjudge. That – it’s both disappointing, I suppose and reassuring. It’s reassuring that you’re aware of the problems there, but disappointing that you haven’t been able to be resourced to do something about them. I understand that we are on a fairly tight schedule today, your Honour. So I understand that we will come to the end of this segment, Mr Callaghan?

MR CALLAGHAN: Yes.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Thank you very much, Jjudge. We appreciate the trouble you’ve taken to speak with us and thank you for sending us your presentation. I had noted that earlier, and so we look forward to reading it?---Thank you for that. And all the best in your important work.

COMMISSIONER GOODA: Thank you.

<THE WITNESS WITHDREW [11.38 am]

COMMISSIONER WHITE: We will take a break now, I think, Mr Callaghan, for 15 minutes - - -

MR CALLAGHAN: Thank you, Commissioners.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: - - - and resume.


RESUMED [11.59 am]

MR CALLAGHAN: I call Sean Harvey.

<SEAN HARVEY, SWORN [11.59 am]

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Thank you, Mr Harvey. Kindly be seated. Sorry, we were – stayed away longer than we had intended, Mr Callaghan.

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<EXAMINATION-IN-CHIEF BY MR CALLAGHAN [12.00 pm]

MR CALLAGHAN: Thank you, Commissioners.

Mr Harvey, for the record, your full name?---Sean Hugh Harvey.

You are the assistant Director General of Youth Justice in Queensland, is that correct?---That’s correct.

Youth justice is part of the Department of Justice and the Attorney-General?---That’s correct.

You have prepared a statement for the purposes of the inquiry; that is, a statement dated 27 June 2017; is that right?---That’s correct.

I tender Mr Harvey’s statement.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: That’s exhibit 639.

EXHIBIT #639 STATEMENT OF SEAN HARVEY DATED 27/06/2017

MR CALLAGHAN: Commissioners, this is almost more of a presentation than evidence, as you are aware. Mr Harvey has a number of discrete issues upon which he is able to assist the Commission. I thought I might just, at the outset, identify the topics that I intend to ask him to speak to because, although there is overlap, some of them are quite separate.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: And also, of course, it will stop us interrupting and jumping ahead when you are going to get there anyway.

MR CALLAGHAN: Well, that’s so, and if there are others – it will also alert you if there are topics I am not intending to address him to.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Certainly.

MR CALLAGHAN: So I was going to ask Mr Harvey to speak to the creation of a First Nations Action Board.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Yes, that’s something original and really quite interesting.

MR CALLAGHAN: It is. And also the creation of a Children’s Court committee. I was going to ask him to speak about trauma-informed practice, about the protective action continuum, I was going to also ask him to speak about small sized youth

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detention facilities, the Transition 2 Success program, the Standardised Program Evaluation Protocol, and the implementation of organisational change. Now, what I really propose - - -

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Won’t leave much for us, then.

MR CALLAGHAN: Well, that was the – that was the ambition. But that at least gives a sense of the sequence for both you and Mr Harvey, and I was really just going to throw those topics at him and let him tell us what he can on them. So, Mr Harvey, if we could begin with what Commissioner White has just observed to be a subject of some interest, not only but also because of its originality. Could you tell us about the First Nations Action Board?---I think the creation of the First Nations Action Board falls out of overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people in our system, and the fact we actually needed to acknowledge that policies and ideas and practices about Aboriginal and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people actually had to come from Aboriginal and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people, as well. So I thought it was important that we created First Nations Action Board, and it’s solely made up of Aboriginal and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people. It’s made up of people who represent different country in Queensland, and I’ve had a long association working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people on communities, and I think a lot of it was about empowering Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people to have a say in the governance of the organisation and by doing that, having a say about outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island young people. And I suppose it illustrates a distinction between what may have happened in the past, in terms of isolated government policy largely created by people who didn’t live on communities or hadn’t been to communities, who probably needed to seek the views of people who lived and needed to have some self-governance around the treatment and support of young people.

And - - -

COMMISSIONER WHITE: The members of that board are all staff members within the portfolio, aren’t they?---Yes. They are all – they range from frontline staff, so experienced social workers who are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, psychologists, frontline workers, managers. But the intention is that they come from all across the state and they represent elements of country. So they’re known people to their community. They’re known people that can come back to the board and, frankly, they do tell me – when I need to be told – that I’m going down the wrong path. So – and of course, the demographics of Queensland, similarly to many states in Australia, there are different needs for different young people in different places. And so that’s why we have to have people who represent country from all of Queensland. There is no one solution to the issues of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people.

In public service bureaucratic terms where does it sit?---Yes. While I’m not a very good bureaucrat, I think it sits within – it sits on our board of management, if you like, so it influences our own decision-making. So every policy that I – that anyone


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comes from a policy area or we’re doing training, it goes before First Nations Action Board and they will tell us whether it’s appropriate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people. It reports – it – I don’t govern it. It has its own ideas and it works on a cultural framework. So elders actually have a say, as they do in the community and younger people have a say within the First Nations Action Board, but I don’t govern the process of the First Nations Action Board. I allow the process to run itself as it would in the community. And certainly, as we mature that process, we invite people from community to come.

MR CALLAGHAN: And what would you say are the challenges in the implementation of such a concept?---It might be considered to be brave in a context of, you know, challenging traditional views about the governance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Brave can be a scary word in the public service?---Yes.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: I think it was in the Yes, Minister sense.

MR CALLAGHAN: Courageous?---Yes.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Can we not just finish with that just yet, because of its innovativeness. How was that managed within the ministry itself? Did it need to go somewhere for discussion and the nod of approval? Was it an initiative that could just be kept within the department itself?---Well, I think it goes to that bravery thing. I mean, at the end of the day I didn’t seek ministerial approval, I just did it, because when I came to youth justice, overrepresentation was alarming, and still is significant, and it was clear something real had to be done. So I didn’t actually seek – I got the views of staff in my own organisation, and also elders from local communities about whether it was a good idea, but I think it’s the responsibility of someone in my role to recognise the issue.

COMMISSIONER GOODA: And, of course, it goes without saying the amount of expertise and, like you say, on the ground experience they bring to a decision-making process across the state, it would be great, wouldn’t it?---Commissioner, it’s really powerful to see it work, it’s an incredibly powerful process, particularly for the northern communities. You know, listening to the judge before about centric ideas. You know, does lend yourself to think that you need to have a wider stance to understand what the real issues are, and I can’t presume to understand the issues.

MR CALLAGHAN: You speak to its power, and in your statement you talk about the real effect that it has, and we haven’t pressed you on this yet and I don’t want to put you on the spot, but are you able to give an example of the effect that it may have had on a policy or program?---So in terms – in terms of things like restorative justice, which – you know, restorative justice on community is another situation. It may be different for non-Indigenous people, but restorative justice from First Nations Action Board advice from us needs to be considered in a different way, and so the application of restorative justice on a community requires a family-led decision


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process. So the First Nations Action Board people brought together ideas around – and challenged some of the more, the concepts of restorative justice in a white community, as compared to an Indigenous community, and so – which lends itself to a greater idea of family-led decision-making. So restoring – where it involves issues between families, having a restorative process between families, not just taking the child and how that restorative process actually works on the ground on community.

COMMISSIONER GOODA: In that example they’ve raised the issue, the department has reacted to it. Would some of those people actually go back out and do it?---Yes – yeah. So they changed our thinking around how we are going to do restorative justice. So in actual fact we’re just finalising our family-led decision-making about families governing the outcomes for the young people, and so that’s on its way to communities now. But it takes – again, I’ve got to emphasise every community is different. And so it takes a while for us to get through that process.

MR CALLAGHAN: Well, I will take my cue if that topic has been exhausted. Well, not exhausted, but for the time being.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Not really, I mean, we could go on for a long time.

MR CALLAGHAN: Sure.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: But there are lots of other things to get through.

MR CALLAGHAN: Sure and the next on the court was the Children’s Court committee. There’s a background to that involving the high proportion of young people on remand and the delays associated with that; is that right?---That’s right, yes.

And so the committee was established as part of a solution to that. What is the value of – I think you’ve listed the full list of participants in your statement, we don’t need to rehearse that, but what’s the value of a committee of this nature?---The children’s – and I think we all may – also may have attached some achievements of the committee, but I think it’s essential when we’re talking about children, as distinct from adult offenders – and there is a clear distinction – that having the head of DPP, having the – you know, legal services ..... those people sitting around the table, about the issue of remand, which is really a scourge across most jurisdictions in the world, that young people sometimes spend too long in remand. And so the Children’s Court committee was set up to really specifically look around issues in regards to timeframes but also defence, prosecution, all the issues that may quicken the process of getting people out of detention who may be on remand.

And those issues again, if – we don’t have to be exhaustive but if you can think of some examples of the types of issues that might be addressed?---Yes. I think it’s quite amazing the number of outcomes in really a bit over a year, new practice directions, new case conferencing, new video directions, getting material published in the legal Proctor, which is the professional magazine sent around, which really


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talks to issues around the committee and what the committee is trying to do. Legal Aid running courses for lawyers in the north, and we’re going to run those throughout the state. You know, I think it could be said that the jurisdiction could be supported by more education for lawyers in relation to representation of children and the particular needs of children.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Is there any thought to an accreditation for practitioners in the youth justice field, like there is in, for example, family law?---My personal view would be that, like the New Zealand system where there’s – actually the President of the Children’s Court, I believe, signs off on the representation of someone in a court. I would strongly advocate for that in the Queensland experience, and I will continue to put that before the committee, and I think there are elements of the committee who are interested in at least, at the very - - -

..... you’ve got the Bar Association and the Law Society would have to come on board?--- Well, that’s right, no easy trick as you can imagine.

COMMISSIONER GOODA: Aboriginal Legal Service, as well?---Yeah, that’s right. Frankly, what’s very interesting about that committee is that everyone has the same view, which is about trying to reach good outcomes for young people. Just like I believe that the judiciary does the same, that ultimately they’re trying to make decisions in the best interests of the child and the community, and I think that finds itself – it’s way to that committee.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: At some point, Mr Callaghan, are you going to talk about the issue of DPP versus police prosecutors in youth courts? If you are not, this might be a good place.

MR CALLAGHAN: Well, this is as good a place as any to address a very long-running debate in Queensland of which I’m acutely aware.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Yes?---Yes. Again, just as I believe that Queensland police service should have its own units in relation to young people, we certainly have discussed at the committee level, and there have been submissions made, about prosecutions taking on more of the prosecutions of young people and those submissions are continuing to be heard by government in Queensland.

MR CALLAGHAN: And you don’t have to associate yourself with them at all but can I just identify for us the arguments for and against, if you like?---I think the arguments lie in that matters that are really double handling, because police are preparing briefs for prosecutions, I think one has to look at the criminality of young people and assume that many times it’s not very complex. Many times the criminality is obvious. For example, since the advent of Facebook, young people steal cars and put their faces on Facebook with the car. It probably doesn’t take long to work out that they’ve committed the offence. Again – so I’m not suggesting that there’s a failure in the criminal justice system, I just believe that rather than double handling, in the interests of the child, because the child then basically deals with one


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prosecution. And the problem being that, the longer matters go out, the less the child associates the crime with the penalty. And that, frankly, doesn’t have any deterrent effect, and the evidence will tell you throughout the world that the longer the remand periods and the longer that young people aren’t heard, the less they understand why they’re actually in the courtroom.

So that if you had specialist police prosecutors who just did Youth Court work a lot of the arguments in favour of having the DPP prosecutors in there would go too, I suspect?---Yes. Yes, that’s right. There are - - -

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Mr Callaghan might want to get down there in the witness box with you and give some evidence himself?---Yeah. Well, I think there are special, there are prosecutors who do a lot of the Children’s Court matters but if you are looking at a regional sense that prosecutor will vary. And, again, the particular needs of children who suffer significant issues need to be – and we’ve taken more of an onus in the jurisdiction to be a more of a voice in the court and not be afraid to – of course, it’s not evidentiary, but it’s in relation to an outcome for the young person to stand up and be heard, if you wish. Which I think supports the process and the judicial decision-making.

MR CALLAGHAN: The delay issue that you identify as being one of particular significance for the child, there’s also a public education dimension to that too, isn’t there?---Yes, there certainly is. I guess – you know, I probably might go to the issue, the long drawn-out phrase of “tough on crime”. But I guess many young people experience time spent, and then are given a sentence and then, when that is displayed in the media it’s displayed as being soft, when in actual fact the younger person may have spent three months in detention.

But the headline is, “Child walks free from court”?---Yes. And the child in that time has received their sentence and spent it. And it’s not good for the child, because in the community they can be targeted. It’s not good for the system. And it’s not – not seen by the community as acting as punishment.

We might move on. Of course, we can always come back, but we might move on to the topic of trauma informed practice. And, of course, this is not a memory test. We might get Mr Harvey’s statement back. I think we were down to – yes, if we focus on 28, I think, which begins with an introduction to the aim of trauma-informed practice. Could you take us through the principles involved there?---Yes. I guess it’s – look, I would imagine the Commission has heard much evidence about the experiences and the issues that young people face, so I won’t necessarily go over those, but it is important to make a distinction that people who work in detention centres in Queensland are youth workers, not correctional people, and as youth workers they have a responsibility to support and connect with young people and to understand the trauma that those young people have faced, and ultimately many of those young people have faced traumatic experiences. And at different times – and I go into detention quite often – at different times young people will lash out, and there will be no reason for that, and that lashing out can be violent, it can be aggressive,


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and there will be no particular reason for it. It’s not that, “I didn’t – wasn’t treated appropriately.” It’s just maybe, “I got a phone call from home and that phone call has upset me and I lash out.” Now, particularly relevant for young women in detention, is the fact that there is, some of their offending is becoming more violent and some of that relates to sexual assault which is, you know, part of their way of dealing with that is now being a bit more physical in their responses. Unless you know that – you don’t actually have to know the elements of what the particular trauma is, but you need to understand that everyone who is in a place of detention can react because they’ve got a trauma issue. And I think that has to be coupled with understanding the science of the brain as well. So trauma is related to the survivalist mind, where young people who may not have had the same supports when they’re born continue to struggle throughout their lives, and don’t develop some of the normal frontal lobe aspects of young people. And things like empathy and social relevance aren’t triggered in their minds as some others may have who live in different types of settings. So trauma is about trying to understand – trauma informed practice is not trauma informed care, because trauma informed care requires – where disclosure is made – for, you know, the right professional help. But it is important to draw the distinction. The next stage of bringing trauma-informed practice to an outcome for young people is positive support behaviours, which is what we’re working on at the moment. So understanding the trauma. If you are a youth detention worker then you should know that you are going to work in a place that, at times, some people, young people might react in a way that you find completely out of sorts for that young people, because you’ve been working with them all day, they’ve been wonderful. But suddenly, something triggers. And the trigger can be very, very small. But – and rather than maybe taking an aggressive stance back towards the child, you readjust your stance to understanding that this is a traumatic response. So it actually has decreased incidents in detention. It actually has seen a better view of the way – and changed somewhat of culture of detention.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Is it that those who work with young people in detention centres never really understood that as the basis for much of the complex behaviour that they found difficult to either to understand or to manage?---Yes. I’m not sure that’s the case in Queensland. What I find in Queensland is that the majority of staff who work in detention come – some of them are very experienced. So they do understand the difficulties of young people and they do understand that they’ve been through elements in their life that challenge them. But I think from a – you know, and I guess detention settings need the continued professional development of people who work in them. And the trauma-informed practice just embeds itself in the treatment of the children. And so those that may have any doubt about whether it’s relevant or not don’t have an option, really, because that’s what we do in Queensland. So that was really the strategy around doing it.

MR CALLAGHAN: That’s right, the conversations that you’ve had with staff might depend upon when you had had them because you’ve trained a lot in the last few years, have you not?---Yes. About 900 or so, yes.


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And one of the things referred to in the terms of inquiry – in the terms of reference for this inquiry is the culture of an institution. It really has to become part of the culture to understand this concept; would you agree with that?---Yes, absolutely. I mean, that’s what we’ve tried to do over the last three years or so. And I think detention places – firstly, we need to change the word “detention” because – and we need to not use the same – the word “prison” at the same time as we’re talking about young people. Prison and – just frankly, it relates to the pure science of the brain. I mean, young people who have a chance with neuroplasticity, and the hotwiring of the mind, have real chances early on to make a difference. So even in their basic treatment and in their basic support, are completely different from when people talk of correctional facilities. And so I happened to hear evidence before about design, and design is really important about open space. And – but culturally, we did have some issues, originally, and with pack training, with trauma-informed practice, with an idea that sort of stemmed from trying to build a world class youth justice system, the reforms have taken over from any view that – so if you were thinking you were going to work in Queensland youth detention, and that would – what I affectionately call got the job because you wanted to be a door banger, that is you wanted to open and shut doors all day, but now if you want to work in Queensland you have to be youth worker and you have to understand the children, and you actually – at the same time you have to protect yourself, you have to protect the children, and you have to protect the community, so there’s always a fine line between the two. And – you know, detention centres sometimes are difficult places with, you know, very, very strong issues, but ultimately they’re about the care and support of children.

MR CALLAGHAN: You mentioned the science of the brain, so I’m just going to pause to make sure there’s nothing from the Commissioners before we move on.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: No, Mr Callaghan.

THE WITNESS: I might mention I presented at the magistrates conference the brain on a big slide and it was quite interesting the responses to what may have been said at court at different times and the reactions. And then there was some academics that were actually providing information to the magistrates as well, which I think is a really good thing in terms of the administration of the justice.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: It certainly comes as a great surprise, I think, for people who haven’t been exposed to any of that more recent work to understand it, and to understand it makes it probably easier to accept that the old way of doing things cannot work, not just doesn’t work but it cannot?---Cannot.

It’s impossible for it to work?---Yes.

And does that brain science, particularly with respect to young people and adolescents, does that feature in the training modules that you give the youth workers?---Yes, certainly. It’s part of the trauma-informed practice, so – because you actually have to understand the effects on the mind. And also we’re developing – we have a community – a practice of psychologists that work for us, so we


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established that because you actually need the professional understanding of the mental illnesses and the cognitive issues and the intellectual problems. So things like FASD, which are difficult to diagnose, and there isn’t a whole lot of diagnostic services around for them. We are trying to develop a practice with the Gold Coast Hospital to try and build some evidence around that. So I think there’s still a long way to go in the science field, but I think some of the work in America which suggests some of the therapies like cognitive behaviour therapy don’t actually work on some of the more traumatised brains, and so the therapeutic approaches have to change as well.

Is your paper that you gave to the magistrate generally available or was it a closed conference?---No. I would be happy to provide it. There’s also an academic paper that I could provide, if I seek the approval of the Chief Magistrate. I am sure he would be happy to provide it.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Thank you. We would be obliged for that. Perhaps somebody in the staff could follow that up with you.

MR CALLAGHAN: We will do that. I knew there would be something.

We might move on to the Protective Action Continuum. You have attached the policy to your statement, but this is something that has been implemented in youth detention facilities. Can you tell us why, and to what end?---I mean, there are going to be incidents in detention. That’s a reality. PAC was brought about based on some of the – really about how to restrain young people without hurting them, and without staff being hurt. Previously, things like wristlocks might be adopted, which would actually hurt young people, but – and it may be that people think that handcuffs are not appropriate in detention but, in fact, in certain elements they actually reduce the danger to young people if they’re used appropriately. I’m not talking about inappropriate use of those instruments, but at times young people attack other young people, and they attack staff, and so PAC is about the different levels of force that goes from one to four. Some of those will just mean slight, you know, moving people on by arm, by holding them. The highest level is to actually stabilise the young person on the ground.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: We have heard quite a lot of evidence about the PAC training which was given to the youth justice workers here in juvenile detention centres. They seemed to have some – some of them seemed to have some difficulty about how to apply it?---Yes. I think you have to – so every incident of the use of PAC in Queensland is reviewed. So any incident involving a young person in detention in Queensland is reviewed. Any inappropriate application of the technique is fully investigated, and anyone who we would find had used the technique to inappropriately deal with a young person would usually receive a significant pay penalty from myself. So I guess PAC is – used the right way, does provide protection, but it’s closely monitored. It has to be reviewed continuously.


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MR CALLAGHAN: And there’s a follow up – or the next step, if you like, in de-escalation is the – there are strategies that are implemented to support and encourage positive behaviours?---That’s right.

Is that correct? I think this might be something that you could expand upon and maybe even relate back to the trauma-informed - - -?---Yes. And that’s part of the impetus of trauma-informed practice. Frankly, level four incidents should be very, very minimal in detention if, used at all, but if they have to be they’re the last port of call. We will shortly have cultural advisory liaison people within detention, so that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers who actually will never involve themselves in the physical restraint of young people, other than to use cultural ways to talk to young people who might be aggressive. So PAC is really not about the use of physical force. Our emphasis when we do PAC training is talking kids, for want of a better term, down in terms of their behaviour. What’s important in terms of the application of PAC is the follow-up from PAC. So if you have to use a significant level, then it’s quite clear that the individual child has a particular problem, and so it’s a behavioural issue. It’s not – it’s not simply someone failing to take direction and, frankly, rarely should level four PAC be used for people failing to take direction. You can always eventually talk a child in to do something, and that’s a matter of persistence and consistency. But I – you know, the use of PAC, you know, is really based on talking situations out. And currently in Queensland – we did have a distinct WorkCover claim issue before we put PAC into place and that’s now about a quarter of – it was quite – and, of course, you know, our people now, with trauma-informed practice, with PAC training which talks about not using physical force at all, if it could be avoided, then saw our injuries to staff drop incredibly. So instead of having a significant workers comp payout, we had probably the least in government.

MR CALLAGHAN: It’s important to remember it’s not just about the children, it’s about the staff as well?---I think you’ve got to recognise that the staff do get hurt.

Yes?---And, you know, they need to be protected themselves. But if you see, as I see sometimes – and what we – you know, what we need to do is that we are recruiting more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in detention. And frankly I see, when people can make a connection that – we have a person who works in Cleveland Youth Detention Centre, who is from Aurukun, now, who works really well with Aurukun young people. And he knows of those people and family and things like that as well. So those connections are really, really important in those institutions.

The next topic I was going to get you to speak about is the concept of small size youth detention facilities. Now, I believe Queensland has no specific projects in this area; is that right?---No, not at this point in time.

But it’s nonetheless a subject on which you might be able to inform the Commission?---Yeah. As an organisation we would advocate that the smaller facility, as is the world evidence now – no one really builds, you know, too big facilities largely because – and we would also like to staff that facility, at some point,


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largely with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff, led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, because we think that gives relevance to people making a difference for young people. And the therapeutic needs and the treatment of young people is obviously easier in a smaller environment.

There’s one topic which I want to address, because it might potentially have some particular relevance for the Northern Territory, and that’s the Transition 2 Success program – for the transcriber, that is the number 2 – this is an initiative for at-risk people who are disengaged from education and at risk of entering the justice system. It involves partnerships with some interesting entities, could you tell us about that?---Yes, I think Transition 2 Success is my favourite subject. It’s a – I guess, to me says what the evidence says, and it is a collective impact approach. So it means that NGOs, business, education, mental health, all come together and local community people come together for the benefit of the child. So at the moment we have it in eight places. We started in about 2015. We’ve got 160 young people who have graduated. They’ve got certificates in all sorts of things, like construction, and they get white cards, they get their driver’s licence. They get a range of education in basic numeracy and literacy that they wouldn’t have had before. So many of our young people are three or four grades behind. They suffer – we did some testing with university in detention the other day and we had 40 per cent of young people actually could not hear very well. And their speech – had speech issues. So frankly, when they sit in a classroom, they actually can’t understand what’s being said to them. And, you know, you have to adjust your education model around that. T2S takes kids who are likely to have a fair chance of entering our system, or at least being involved in criminality but maybe not prosecuted, and also young people who are offenders. So it joins a cohort of people together who otherwise would have failed in education, with a view to that cohort building their own success. It’s quite amazing how, when you put those young people together, they will support each other. We have amazing stories of young people. So at the moment – it has been going for almost two years. We have got a 70 per cent non-offending rate, and we haven’t got a proper evaluation framework, but early days. It’s probably not the way – it’s probably not a project or a program because, as I say to everyone in my organisation, it’s actually the way you’re supposed to work with young people. So I get amazed – I was at Hervey Bay the other day, there were 15 to 20 organisations in the room for nine children. Those nine children all have had experiences in the criminal justice system. They have not offended the whole time they’ve been on the program. Two-week programs do little or nothing for children who have complex needs. You need to actually engage the children the whole time and engage their families. So we have got young people who have been on T2S for two years. One particular young fellow, who sends me texts asking me what – if the – what the colour of the furniture is in my room, because he wants to take my job one day. But he was a very serious offender, he ended up getting a job with a training organisation, and I’ve just employed him as a youth worker. So what it proves to local communities is that young offenders can be very successful. And, you know, we have businesses across the range who come and give us materials - - -


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I was going to ask you about that, the business aspect of it in particular. I think we understand – or can understand how partnerships with schools or training organisations, that sort of thing can be arranged and what they might look like, but it was the partnerships with businesses that I was particularly going to ask you about, if you could illustrate?---Yes. You know, a good example is Coles, for example – not that I should mention a brand name.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: This is not the ABC?---Yeah. I – they were across the road from one particular place where we running T2S. And, of course, the kids used to play up in their car park and cause a bit of trouble. So when – so, from a real engagement point of view, I said, “Go and talk to Coles about how they can participate, because it will stop the kids rung around in their car park.” And the manager said, “Absolutely, we want to help.” So they started – we had some kids who got jobs there, three kids. And they allowed us to get a trolley full of food every day for the families of the children.

MR CALLAGHAN: So many stories of the juvenile crime begin in a shopping centre car park?---Yes. Yes. So Bunnings, you know, they gave us things to build so we could build gardens. We go out to farms in different places and work on farms and help farmers. We, in Aurukun we started T2S, which is a big challenge for us, on a remote Aboriginal community, to make it work. But young people are turning up all the time. So we generally have a 93 per cent attendance rate because it’s a connection to an outcome, a thing that the children can see. Yeah, I – T2S is an outstanding process to try and change young people.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: How did you – how did you go about engaging initially with the small business, or the bigger business, community in which you are operating? I mean the Coles story is a good example of one, but I’m thinking more broadly?---I guess for our children someone actually has to get on the street and go and approach people. So it was actually part of the cultural change to say, “Your job is not about compliance, your job is about outcomes for young people.” So there’s a big difference. In a juvenile system, young people can turn up, the caseworkers can see them and we tick the box, and out they go. Or we can actually do something that’s going to make an outcome for the young people. So I say to managers who – you know, “There’s 18 service centres across Queensland, your job is to put your high heels on, or your nice shiny shoes, put your suit on and go to the Chamber of Commerce. We have got to find jobs for our kids, and we’ve got to find skills and we’ve got to find education.” Because ultimately – you know, education has such an impact on them. So people just started knocking on doors and frankly, every business that we approach is interested. I don’t think we realised that until we started it.

Presumably, once the person on – in the business who is responsible for coordinating with you, once they and their staff actually hear why the young people have offended, what terribly sad and challenged lives they’ve had, their attitude would probably change. Would that be the case?---I think that’s the absolute salient point. It brings home the issue of who is a young offender to those people. So I get amazed


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at companies like Bunnings and people who come – metal works, roofers, tilers, many of those people have actually experienced challenges in their lives too, and they have an empathy for the children, which is wonderful.

MR CALLAGHAN: Just going back to the example that you gave about the young offender who is now a youth worker, one of my colleagues has posed the interesting question as to whether there was difficulty for that young person getting a blue card, a working with children certification?---Yes. That’s still something we’re working through, but I think the blue card issue is being further considered by the Queensland government in terms of these matters anyway, and I can’t talk to that, but frankly if we are not going to give them jobs and not talk the talk, then we can’t go and ask anyone else to do it.

Yes, thank you. I was going to move on to the Standardised Program Evaluation Protocol, the aim of which is to prioritise improvements, and effectiveness, and quality of youth justice programs. It’s something that can – could be used?---Yeah. I would advocate that you actually use this framework anywhere because Mark Lipsey, who developed – Dr Mark Lipsey developed it from Vanderbilt University in the States. Looked at – I’m not quite sure of the number – may be 300, may be more – programs of – that were designed to assist juvenile offenders throughout the world, and tested them all, and came up with a framework which creates an evidence base. He – I won’t call him a guru in this space, but I think he is. I guess when I first came to youth justice, when I asked people what were the programs and what was the evidence for them working, it was very difficult to get any responses that I would say are evidentiary. They might be – it might – they might be nice programs, and they may achieve things, but there’s no evidence of that. So we basically have to SPEP all our programs, which we are doing, and we are using in detention to know – there’s still, from our perspective, a lot of work to do in terms of developing other programs in detention. And, following the review in Queensland, we received some money to do cultural – improve our cultural relationships with young people, improve some of the programming, the oversight, a few other things. So – but the review also mentioned that SPEP was a model that we should continue to adopt, you know, because frankly you can have wood carving for young boys, but it is actually working with elders while you do the wood carving, where you are actually getting a conversation between the young person and the elder? And therefore you do actually get a – so something as simple as wood carving would be okay if it had the process of cultural mentoring built into it. So it just challenges the whole thinking around what’s evidence or not.

MR CALLAGHAN: The quick way to introduce the final topic I have for you might be to get paragraphs 55 to 57 on the screen. It’s headed Implementation of Organisational Change, which is ultimately what it’s all about. So could we - - -?---Probably take a little while to get through that.

Well, you’ve done it in three paragraphs?---Yes. Witty me. I think, before, I mentioned tough on crime. I just don’t think those words really fit in a juvenile sense. Certainly, young people need to be held accountable for their offending, I


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think that’s important. But without understanding the cause of their offending and understanding the reasons why they offended, and how you might treat those reasons, then essentially the tough on crime course in my personal view – it’s my own personal view – is a bit shallow and it doesn’t understand the complexities of youth offending anywhere. But I guess understanding overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the system, and the fact that we need to challenge the way we think about that. How Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people can actually have a say in outcomes for their young people is relevant to the whole system. Frankly, it’s – you know, I guess it comes down to people appreciating outcomes rather than compliance. And the clear distinction for me is when someone comes into my room, I basically ask them two questions: how does that help the child, and how does that stop them offending? Because, frankly, stopping them offending means that you’ve actually put the supports in place that either going to school, they might have a job, they may have re-engaged with their family, they might get mental health treatment. So offending is a plausible target in the community, because the community also wants to hear that children aren’t offending. So basically our goal is to build a world class system that stop kids – stops children from offending. Because, primarily, everything about stopping them offending is the rehabilitation and the support.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: One of the problems, it seems to me is around the language. The shallow language, if you like, but a lot of criminal activity seems to be sheeted home to juveniles, as the expression tends to be in the media. Their definition of juvenile seems to be a bit flexible, but in many cases the newspaper, the print press, does seem to have popularise this notion that it is the young people who are largely responsible for the wave of crime in our communities. Anything to assist us with that perspective?---Yeah. I think again it’s an evidentiary issue. Youth offending throughout the world is actually decreasing. So our – in the Queensland experience, it’s more individual young people committing more often. So the multiple of the offending is – say I used to commit six offences, on average. Now, I commit nine. So those that are recidivist, and I think if you study this anywhere, are more recidivist. And it is – it is not true to say that there’s a youth crime problem in Australia, in my view. It is true to say that the effects of ice and mental health and other issues have led to those who are vulnerable to crime, to commit more offences, and I think that’s probably the more relevant argument. Portraying children in the community as criminals, and Dr Mark Lipsey writes about this in the States. In America, where that was done, led to more criminality, because if you are living on a remote community and you’re seen as only one thing – that is an offender – you’re probably going to fulfil that prophesy. I think – you know, the system requires positive thinking, not thinking of deficiency. It requires people who have a positive view about young people, because positivity – and that’s what T2S does, it lives off positivity down to the young person, and I think we don’t celebrate the great things in young people in this system, we celebrate the deficiencies of young people in the system, and that’s a mistake to be honest, because it actually acts therapeutically against them.


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MR CALLAGHAN: Commissioners, we have navigated a broad path through Mr Harvey’s - - -

COMMISSIONER WHITE: We just have - - -

MR CALLAGHAN: - - - evidence, but I’m at the end of - - -

COMMISSIONER WHITE: You’re at the end of – yes.

MR CALLAGHAN: - - - my part of it.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Yes ..... very logical.

MR CALLAGHAN: .....

COMMISSIONER WHITE: I just thought that probably we just skipped over a bit of one of the main drivers for the establishment of the Children’s Court committee. That is, the reduction in remand. And you did say, of course, and used a good expression, saying it was a scourge of – worldwide. Were there any strategies that have emerged from that committee about it? I think we didn’t get back to actually whether it had done anything?---Yes. Yes, there are a range of things that are actually – which I thought I might have attached as part of the evidence, but we’ve – there has been a number of practice directions issued by the court as a result of the committee. So some of those relate to – there will be more case conferences for all matters involving children, which can lead to different outcomes. So basically the practice direction calls for case conferences and callovers within matters before the jurisdiction. We’ve got more trial listing dates out of that through the Children’s Court, in the higher court. We’ve – the Queensland police have changed their operational manual in terms of sexting or sexting matters and how they police those matters throughout Queensland. We’ve changed the orders in relation to granting bail for children, in the form that’s actually used, and whilst that sounds a small issue, it’s very relevant to the court. And the form actually reflects more suitable conditions for the young people. We’ve built a youth practitioners guide. Of course, the issue that you raised previously in relation to the DPP beginning a committal pilot project is before the committee. So we still push that through as part of the committee. And the other thing is hearing matters together for children, which is a real issue because of the transient nature of some young people who offend. They can have a number of matters across a number of courts, and we’re trying to get all those matters heard together, which is really, really important for outcomes in the criminal justice system, I think.

MR CALLAGHAN: What about mental health, was that something that’s - - -?---Mental health is – yes, we – in Queensland now have a lot – are mental health support workers in just about every Children’s Court that we hold, and mental health people sit on the committee, and so there’s lots more work to be done there, but that’s the main focus of committee in terms of how reports are given to the court, and


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how that may delay or otherwise which – you know, are really important to the progress of the matter.

What about access to education in detention, is that something that’s - - -?---Yes. Well, we have invited education more recently to committee. We would – the committee is of – you know, looking at things like education plans for people as they appear in court. So – but that’s yet to be fully explored by the committee at this point.

A range of examples?---So it’s a range of things. And I guess getting things published in Proctor and other things brings home some things to the profession that we just need to continue and the training that Legal Aid is providing, I think, will go a long way to helping the jurisdiction.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Thank you very much, Mr Harvey for coming up to Darwin to talk to us about these initiatives?---My pleasure.

And we can only say congratulations on so many of them, particularly the First Nations - - -?---Yes.

- - - initiative, that really is quite something?---Yes. Thank you.

<THE WITNESS WITHDREW [1.00 pm]

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Alright. Well, we will resume at - - -

MR CALLAGHAN: 2 o’clock.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: - - - 2 o’clock for Dr Riordan and - - -

MR CALLAGHAN: And Dr Jureidini.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: - - - Dr Jureidini. Yes. Thank you.

ADJOURNED [1.00 pm]

RESUMED [2.10 pm]

MR CALLAGHAN: Excuse me, Commissioners.



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MS BROWNHILL: Commissioners, you are probably alive to the fact that there has been an exchange of correspondence in relation to Professor Jureidini’s evidence and the manner in which it’s given. I’ve had some discussions with my learned friend about that. We initially sought to have the matter dealt with in a closed hearing, or the evidence dealt with in a closed hearing. We have been given some assurances about how things will proceed, specifically in relation to what will be done with his report and the other documents in relation to some redactions. We have asked for some further redactions. I understand my friend is not going to tender the report until we have sorted those out.


MS BROWNHILL: Yes. Or tender it, but keep it confidential until those are sorted out, which is fine. We have also been provided with some indication of the scope of his oral evidence and, on the basis of that indication, we are content for the evidence to proceed in an open hearing. My only concern, and the reason I rise to say this material now, is that this is a statement made at least by the solicitors assisting the Royal Commission and may not necessarily extend to, or others may not be aware of, the desire for the evidence to be constrained in the way that has been indicated. So I’m not sure of the best way to proceed. I can read on to the transcript, if that would assist, what has been indicated in the way of what the evidence will – what the oral evidence will cover, and I can foreshadow my intention to object, to the extent that anyone traverses other evidence, or the content of the report in any way.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: I think probably – Mr Callaghan can probably do that in his role as guiding the evidence before us.

MS BROWNHILL: Certainly.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: And we do understand that it was provided to the Northern Territory quite late, but you do understand the reason for that. We have been informed of that.

MS BROWNHILL: Well, I don’t want to enter into an argument about that. We have been provided with a reason. Given that the material was all in our possession anyway, I don’t really see that that is a reason not to indicate to us the proposed course or the proposed content of the Professor’s report. We have could have, four weeks ago, been addressing this problem instead of seeking to do it now. And I do have an application to make which I think can more usefully made after Professor Jureidini has given his evidence.

MR CALLAGHAN: I don’t think there’s any issue as between myself and the Solicitor as to what could happen, but it now appears to me that the issues might more likely arise between Mr O’Connell and the Solicitor. In terms of the way in which the questioning will proceed, I am happy to proceed on the basis that I’ve indicated, but I’m not the only party who will be asking questions.


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COMMISSIONER WHITE: Yes. Has Mr O’Connell been drawn into these conversations?

MR O’CONNELL: First I’ve heard of it.

MR CALLAGHAN: I don’t think so and that is unfortunate .....

COMMISSIONER WHITE: I think we ought to perhaps allow Mr O’Connell to have a conversation with you and Ms Brownhill before we proceed further.

MR CALLAGHAN: Unfortunately, I think that’s right.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Otherwise – and can I just say the option open, if you can’t agree to the parameters, Mr O’Connell, we might need to revisit the leave issue. Alright. Thank you. We will just adjourn until you let us know that you have sorted it out. Thank you.

ADJOURNED [2.15 pm]

RESUMED [2.32 pm]

MR CALLAGHAN: It is proposed to call Dr Jureidini, but there are some preliminary issues which should best be placed on the record and, before we go any further, the Solicitor might be a convenient place to start.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Ms Brownhill, perhaps we do need to have it clarified what the concerns are of the Northern Territory are about the body of evidence that might be adduced from Dr Jureidini.

MS BROWNHILL: Well, they are usefully set out in the correspondence which we’ve provided to the solicitors assisting, and I do have a copy of that, which I can hand to the Commission. I would be loath to read that out, from beginning to end sentence, but I’m concerned to not leave something out. But the significant concern for us – perhaps - - -

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Do you want us to read it or - - -

MS BROWNHILL: Yes. That would be .....

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Why don’t we do that.

MS BROWNHILL: Thank you. That’s a bundle of the correspondence between – so our letter, a response to that, and our further letter.


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COMMISSIONER WHITE: Yes. Thank you. Would you like that bundle of correspondence to be made an exhibit then, Ms Brownhill?

MS BROWNHILL: Yes, I think that would be useful. And a confidential one, if - - -

COMMISSIONER WHITE: A confidential one.

MS BROWNHILL: Yes.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Yes. Thank you. Exhibit 640, the exchange of correspondence between the Solicitor for the Northern Territory and the Ssolicitor assisting Assisting the Royal Commission comprising three letters. Thank you. And it’s received on a confidential basis. That is, it will not be released.

EXHIBIT #640 CONFIDENTIAL EXCHANGE OF CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN SOLICITOR FOR THE NORTHERN TERRITORY AND SOLICITOR ASSISTING THE ROYAL COMMISSION COMPRISING THREE LETTERS

MS BROWNHILL: Thank you. So the upshot is that in relation to the evidence – the professor’s opinions about the medical treatment provided – we are concerned that, having been provided with this material at this point in time, it may be necessary to – I should preface that by saying the opinions expressed are extremely serious. They culminate in the final opinion, or the opinion expressed on page 13 of the professor’s report, the second paragraph. So they raise an extremely serious issue. There’s no evidence presently before the Commission that would suggest this is a systemic problem as opposed to something in the way of a one-off medical treatment concern.

And, having been provided with this material at this point in time, and cognisant of the fact that the professor’s views are not necessarily mainstream psychiatric profession views, we consider it may be necessary, in order to provide a proper response, to obtain expert opinion in response. That would require both the location of, taking of instructions from the particular medical practitioners.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: That can be done.

MS BROWNHILL: Well the concern, Commissioner, is that there is a vast body of material that would have to be provided to an expert. And, yes - - -

COMMISSIONER WHITE: But it can be done. Because they’re experts and they’re used to assessing this sort of evidence they’re often provided with whole volumes of clinical notes and so on.


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MS BROWNHILL: There’s no doubt that it can be done. The concern is whether it can be done within the time left to this Commission prior to the Commission having to make findings and draft and write a report. We also did not understand, until it’s now suggested perhaps – well, we’ve asked the question and haven’t had an answer, but we did not understand that this issue was an issue that to be the subject of any findings on the part of the Commission, because it relates to medical treatment provided to individuals in institutions outside of the detention setting. So, again - - -

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Well, it’s ancillary to.

MS BROWNHILL: It may be ancillary, and that is why I am not standing here making a relevance objection, Commissioner, but it is a major issue that – and a very serious one that should not be embarked on simply on the basis of it being ancillary to something else. As I say, the underlying evidence which might identify this particular issue as something more than, or as something in the order of a systemic matter, is also lacking and would have to be obtained, identified and, if necessary, also responded to. So it opens an enormous can of worms, if I can call it that, at a very late stage in the proceeding - - -

COMMISSIONER WHITE: The issue of mental health has been a live issue throughout this Commission, Ms Brownhill.

MS BROWNHILL: And I’m not speaking that broadly, Commissioner, in the sense that there have been systemic issues raised about how one addresses detainees’ mental health issues and so on. But the particular observations made by the professor are new. They are not something that has been the subject of earlier evidence or identification as a particular issue. We are concerned that we would not have, at this point in time, an adequate opportunity to respond to this adverse expert opinion evidence which is why, firstly, we would ask that the – if these matters are intended to be canvassed, we would ask that it be done in a closed session.

And we seek to be told whether or not the Commission intends to, or is to be asked to, make a finding along the lines of what’s expressed in that paragraph so that we can explore and then if necessary, or if we can, take the steps to respond and provide evidence in response.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: You just might need to expand a little on why holding this part of the inquiry in closed court, as opposed to open court with, of course, the protections of not identifying any individuals, would assist the position in which you say you find yourself.

MS BROWNHILL: Because we are not yet able to say whether or not we can provide responsive material. If we cannot do that, then the allegations made by the professor go out into the public arena and are unanswerable and that is unfair, in my submission.


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COMMISSIONER WHITE: Well, you may not be able to find any expert who could counter that. And that would be the same position.

MS BROWNHILL: With more time, we could probably have found an expert to at least express a view. That view may then guide our position about whether or what response we make to the opinion. But presently we are not satisfied that we are going to be in a position to be able to respond one way or the other and to obtain the assistance of either the particular practitioners themselves or an expert who can express a view about the treatment.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Well, I understand that – although, it has been very much in the arena this particular – these particular individuals’ treatment at the hands of the various agencies of the Territory. No doubt it was not sharply identified that, in itself, this would be indicative of systemic failure. That’s really the issue that you are raising, I think, Ms Brownhill, is it not? Because so many witnesses have been asked about this person. She herself has given evidence about her treatment.

MS BROWNHILL: Yes. But she has not expressed an expert opinion about the adequacy or appropriateness of the medical treatment she was provided and nor have any of the other witnesses.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Because they couldn’t. Alright. Thank you. Now, Mr Callaghan, I’m just not quite sure whether we need to hear from Mr O’Connell on this, which is just a broader issue, of course, at this stage. What’s your view about closed or open, if you would be kind enough to - - -

MR CALLAGHAN: I submit the evidence can be heard in open court, because the questions that I had for the doctor weren’t going to, to my mind, cause any trouble for the Solicitor. Of course, I was going to tender the report, as he gave evidence and that is where the trouble may be. But if - - -

COMMISSIONER WHITE: That’s where the issue arises.

MR CALLAGHAN: But that can be controlled. The court doesn’t have to be closed in order to deal with such issues that might arise from that.

MS BROWNHILL: I accept that. I agree with that. It’s only in relation to questioning, which is proposed to go outside of the indication in the letter from the solicitors assisting the Royal Commission, which I understood my learned friend, Mr O’Connell, to be intending to do.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: There are two ways of managing that of course. One is to indicate to Mr O’Connell that, on reflection, his line of questioning doesn’t assist us with systemic issues and withdraw leave. The other, of course, is for him to ask his questions, limited as they have been by the leave, in closed court.

MR CALLAGHAN: And as to those, it’s probably for Mr O’Connell to speak to.


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COMMISSIONER WHITE: It is. So, Mr O’Connell.

MR O’CONNELL: Commissioners, my preference is of course to be able to ask the questions in open court. I think the issues raised by Professor Jureidini are quite significant. The objection from the Solicitor-General seems to be along the lines of, “Well, we aren’t in a position to answer the evidence that will be given by Mr Jureidini and we need more time,” and nothing more substantial than that.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: It is a realistic view that, once that evidence is in the public arena, the particular opinion to which she refers, no amount of later other evidence will undo it. I mean, that’s just being practical. We know that is how public perceptions work.

MR O’CONNELL: Yes. Well, if that discrete area, being the issue of [RETRACTED] is the – sorry.

MS BROWNHILL: Could that be retracted from the transcript.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Yes. Can you take that out of the transcript. Thank you.

MR O’CONNELL: If that possible issue is the only issue, is it possible that I ask questions in relation to that in closed court, but the remainder of my questions are in open court.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Do you want to be heard on that, Ms Brownhill?

MS BROWNHILL: Our concern obviously is the dividing line, and where they sit, and that may give rise to objections on my part and disjuncted evidence

COMMISSIONER WHITE: We are not too worried about the disjuncted evidence. I think we can manage that, but you really will be on a tight rein, Mr O’Connell.

MR O’CONNELL: Certainly.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: And – I mean, I am of the view it would be safest to do all your questions in closed court.

MR O’CONNELL: Well, Commissioners, the way I proposed my cross-examination in any event was to leave that discrete issue until last, and I will foreshadow before I go to that issue that I’m about to, and I would prefer the rest of the evidence to be available to the public.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Well, we have got Ssenior Ccounsel Aassisting, of course, who will be looking at the systems issues which is what we are concerned about in our – in the public arena. I know there are some issues that you wish to canvass yourself. I think to avoid any risk and there is the oddity too, of having to go in and


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out because it takes a little while to reconfigure the court, for the time being I think we will suggest that your questioning of Dr Jureidini be done entirely in closed court, Mr O’Connell.

MR O’CONNELL: Yes. I accept that, Commissioner.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Thank you. Can we then proceed.

MR CALLAGHAN: And I foreshadow - - -

COMMISSIONER WHITE: If Dr Jureidini hasn’t wandered off and gone somewhere in Spain that’s more enticing than presently is.

MR CALLAGHAN: And I suppose, to be clear, when I do tender his report, it would be on the basis that it remain confidential for the time being, until further order.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Yes. Thank you. Are we in a position, then – is Dr Riordan actually going to be giving evidence in a panel session or is it sequentially?

MR CALLAGHAN: No, sequentially.


MR CALLAGHAN: So I call Jon Jureidini.

<JON JUREIDINI, CALLED [2.50 pm]

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Hope he’s still there.

MR CALLAGHAN: I hope.

Dr Jureidini, can you hear me?---I can. It’s clear, thank you.

MR CALLAGHAN: It’s Peter Callaghan, Ccounsel Aassisting the Royal Commission, speaking. The Commission is currently in session with Commissioners White and Gooda presiding.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Good afternoon, Dr Jureidini. Commissioner Gooda and I are grateful that you have interrupted what is no doubt a very pleasant holiday to assist us in the Commission. We are sorry for the delay. There were a number of matters of a more administrative kind that we had to settle before we could get to hear from you.

DR JUREIDINI: No problem, thank you.

.ROYAL COMMISSION 29.6.17 P-5336 J. JUREIDINI ©Commonwealth of Australia

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MR CALLAGHAN: We might proceed, doctor. You’ve prepared a report dated 28 May 2017. You created that report for the purposes of this Royal Commission; is that correct?---Yes.

On the basis earlier outlined, I tender that report.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Thank you, Dr Jureidini’s report is exhibit 641. There is a confidentiality order made in respect of that report and it will not be released unless there is some subsequent order.

EXHIBIT #651 CONFIDENTIAL REPORT OF DR JUREIDINI

MR CALLAGHAN: Doctor, we have your CV, but for current purposes it includes the fact that you’ve worked as the director of adolescent psychiatry in the Adelaide Hospital and in that role you were responsible for mental health services in juvenile detention; is that correct?---That was some time ago but yes, I did hold that role for a decade.

Yes. Can I begin on a broad note and just ask you to speak to the potential vulnerabilities of children in detention settings in terms of mental health?---Well. almost inevitably children who come into detention have been – had traumatic lives and broken trust in relationships. So they come into our environment, which inevitably – difficult, with – often without the resources to deal with the difficulties of that environment. And, therefore, need lots ..... primary goal when they come into the environment is to try to give them a sense of safety. And that’s a challenge in that environment, but until and unless we can make children feel safe, then we can’t do anything about rehabilitating them.

And is there a further – I will start that again. Obviously, parents are part of a child’s safety network, but is there a further or any further psychiatric significance to the fact of separation or isolation of the child from their family whilst they’re in detention?---Yes, absolutely. I mean, any child who is taken away from their safe place will grieve that separation. And the more vulnerable they are, the more difficult that will be ..... somebody obviously and overtly misses their family, then any sympathetic ear, and the passage of time, and kind treatment will overcome that relatively readily. But children who, for whatever reason, can’t directly express their distress, it makes it much more difficult to help them through that process because, you know, it’s more difficult to recognise what they’re experiencing as grief. It might manifest itself as angry or other difficult behaviour.

You refer to the concept of a sympathetic ear and within a detention setting, in terms of an adult sympathetic ear, that’s likely only to be available for extended periods from a youth justice officer or a staff member of the detention centre. They’re, of course, in that circumstance, effectively in loco parentis. They can never be a parent, but what sort of things can reasonably be expected of youth justice officers in this


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context, do you think?---Well, I think it really depends on the training and support that they have. I mean, under the current circumstances in many jurisdictions you can’t expect the youth justice officers to be offering what’s required of them in loco parentis. But, properly trained and supported, then what they need to provide is a sense of emotional safety. So, you know, normally children who come into youth detention can’t manage their feelings for themselves, and they – under circumstances when they’re placed under pressure and coming into youth detention is an example of that. So they need scaffolding from people who understand their distress, who don’t immediately respond to angry behaviour by becoming angry back, or placing firm, harsh limits on the child, but rather recognise that anger might be their way of expressing their fear and sadness, and help the young person to understand what they’re experiencing.

So any sort of model - - -?---So - - -

I’m sorry, go on?---So what we’re looking for is a combination of firmness and empathic care towards the child. Much like you would expect in a boarding school or other environments in which children are, for whatever reason, forced to be away from home and are likely to be distressed by – initially distressed by that separation and need other people to help them through that process.

You’ve mentioned the need for staff to be trained for these purposes and for other purposes too, because is it the case that sometimes responses to children in detention, children who have a mental health issue, responses in the way of conventional behaviour management tools, like punishment and rewards, even if they’re well-intentioned, they might be positively counterproductive; is that the case?---Absolutely. Just to make one point, you said those with mental health needs. I mean, I don’t think it’s ever going to be possible to divide children in juvenile detention neatly into those with mental health issues and those without. There’s a continuum. Almost anybody who comes into juvenile detention has mental health issues, more or less by definition, so it’s not like there are different approaches required for – I mean, obviously each child needs to be treated differently, but they’re not sort of two groups of kids, one of whom need one kind of treatment and one of whom need another kind of treatment. The issue you raise - - -

That point is well taken, thank you?---The issue you raise about rewards and punishments, I mean, you know, a happy, healthy child will engage with external rewards and punishments. That will get – that will get the child to try harder at the task that has been set for them and they get a sense of mastery from that, and that becomes internally rewarding. But one thing to remember is the external rewards and punishments we apply to children are sort of miniscule in their effect compared to what is going on internally. You know ..... sources of pain and pleasure to this individual. And there are two situations in which rewards and punishment don’t work. One is where the child is already trying very hard and children – young people are much more like hares than tortoises in this respect: they try in bursts and then you catch them not trying, and you think they are not trying hard enough, so you tell them to try harder. That humiliates them and makes them – and reinforces their


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sense of failure, and makes things worse rather than better. So – you know, particularly you’re seeing, as they come into juvenile detention they are struggling just to hold it together, and to try and impose rewards and punishments on top of that just is much more likely to increase their sense of failure than it is to give them a sense of mastery. And the second point – the second place where rewards and punishments don’t work is when there are other things on the child’s mind that outweigh rewards and punishment that are imposed externally. So, you know, a child that’s preoccupied with worry about what’s happening to their family on the outside is much more tied up with that than they are with anything that can be imposed externally. And they won’t – they just won’t engage with the system. Like, for rewards and punishments to work, when they work best, it’s a kind of playful atmosphere that’s created and the child engages and becomes part of that system and everybody has some fun in the process. Now, you’re never going to achieve that in a situation where a child is distressed and lonely and frightened. So it’s just the wrong kind of approach to take to children in detention.

So what sorts of policies should be applied in those situations?---Well, I guess the task when a new child comes into detention is to get to know them. It doesn’t mean necessarily finding out everything about them. Take them as they are. If things go well, and you don’t need to find out anything more about them, they adapt to the circumstances and that’s kind of the end of it. If they struggle, then you need to be trying to find out why they’re struggling, what’s the barrier for this child in settling into the environment? So that’s when collaboration is needed with other services. Usually, there’s – although there can be huge gaps in the information about children who come into detention, there usually is large amounts of information available. And thinking carefully about that information will give us insight into what this particular child needs. So – but, you know, there isn’t – in training in terms of – there’s a need for training in terms of providing curriculum material for youth justice officers. But the greater need is the need for support and reflection with real life work in the environment, so that instead of being overwhelmed by the inevitable challenges that come along to staff group work constructively at meeting those challenges, and that’s asking a lot. And sometimes a really important point is that if you put somebody in juvenile detention and expect them to survive that experience, and even benefit from the experience, that is asking an enormous amount. So you can’t expect it to happen without a lot of energy and inevitably expense being put towards that process, otherwise you’re using juvenile detention as a kind of ..... way of keeping kids off the streets. You have to acknowledge that you are going to harm those children by keeping them off the streets, you know the kind of economical approach to it is going to do harm, and is going to cost a lot more harm in the long term because you are producing damaged individuals who are going to cost society.

Perhaps without knowing it, in the course of what you have just said, you have answered many, if not all, of the further questions I had for you. Just excuse me for one moment. Just finally, from me, doctor – there will be questions from others, but can you just indicate in your opinion as to whether there are any circumstances that would justify a child that did not have a diagnosed psychiatric illness from being prescribed medications that are ordinarily used for a psychiatric illness?---I think it’s


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a very difficult question. Certainly it’s ordinary practice for children who don’t have specific psychiatric illnesses to be placed on psychiatric medication. One of the difficulties is that, you know, psychiatric medications are pretty non-specific. So if you develop tonsillitis and you are given penicillin for that tonsillitis, that’s a specific treatment for a bacteria that’s causing your illness and when we label psychiatric drugs antidepressant, antipsychotics, there’s an implication that there’s similarity in that what is happening, in that antidepressants treat depression, but in fact there’s no good evidence for that. These are drugs which have a fairly predictable range of effects, and in some individuals the benefits of those drugs outweigh the harms. If somebody is psychotic, then making them emotionally and cognitively numb with a so-called antipsychotic drug will be a benefit to them, whereas that someone who wasn’t psychotic being emotional and cognitively numbed is – the harms outweigh the benefits. So because psychiatric drugs are sort of symptomatic in their use it’s hard to draw a line about who should be on them and who shouldn’t be on them. So – but generally speaking, if somebody says that a child doesn’t have a psychiatric disorder and then gives them psychiatric drugs, then that cannot be regarded in any sense as treatment. So it must be, in fact, being used as a form of chemical restraint - - -

And that’s - - -?--- - - - and that certainly happens in psychiatric units where, you know, children – albeit they have a mental illness, the actual purpose of giving them the medication is to sedate them in a kind of non-specific way. But, you know, the other side of that is if we do prescribe makes for somebody as psychiatrists then we have an absolute obligation then to be involved in that person’s care. It’s not okay to say, “This person doesn’t have a psychiatric problem, therefore it’s not a mental health issue, the mental health shouldn’t be involved but yes, they can have some of these powerful and dangerous drugs because that will make them easier for you to manage.” That just, for me, is ethically unacceptable.

Alright. Just finally, we’ve – well, sorry, there might be two other things. Just on the question of medication for children in detention, how should we approach the issue of consent? How can a child – can a child consent to medication? And normally, perhaps, we would expect a parent to do it but, of course, detached from their parents in detention a child might be in a different situation. I’m talking about any medication here whatsoever?---Yeah. Well .....

What is your experience of how that is handled?---Well, we always want the child to agree, you know, to feel agreeable to the idea of being on medication, even if they’re – you know, under 14 and from 14 to 16, in most jurisdictions, children can give consent to medical treatment under certain circumstances and from 16 on then they are able to give consent themselves. To give medication to somebody without their consent is always a big deal, or should always be a big deal, and something that requires reflection, in some cases using the Mental Health Act. It’s not something that should be entered into lightly. And I would think it’s something that should be – any use of psychotropic medication in the juvenile detention system, I think, should be subject to audit. So every time somebody is prescribed psychotropic medication somebody should hear about that. There should be some overseeing body that looks


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at – two things, I think: any time any child is placed in seclusion and any time anybody is prescribed psychotropic medication, then that needs to be documented and reflected on.

And this is my final question, and it relates to facilities: we had some evidence from some architects this morning about what a detention facility might look like, and I’m particularly interested in the concept of what might be described, or was described earlier in the life of this Commission, as a padded cell or some sort – what would you look for in a space or a facility within a detention centre that could deal with situations where children are highly distressed or angry or suffering from withdrawal from drugs or from – you know, some sort of mental illness that causes them to behave in a particular way? What should the space – facility provide for?---See, the problem is that in a way – and this is true of emergency departments as well – in a way you are constricted that you’ve the room that is suitable for the most difficult, most challenging patient you are ever going to see, which by definition makes it not appropriate for most of the people who are going to use that room. So, you know, there will always be situations in which a room proves unsuitable in some way. I mean, you know, the videos that you showed me demonstrate that. But, yeah, the space that is likely to be therapeutically useful for somebody who is distressed, and no longer able to manage their behaviour is a soft space. And I don’t mean a padded cell. I mean a space with soft furnishings, you know, gentle lighting, that kind of stuff that anybody would find relaxing. I mean, kids aren’t different from us. And you think about the kind of space where, if you were distressed, you would want to withdraw to versus the kind of space that’s physically secure, and there’s not a great deal of overlap between them. So the door would ideally open, and the child would have the opportunity to go in there, but the reality is there are going to be times when doors do need to be locked in a detention environment. So that creates an enormous challenge, but I think the most important thing is that there is a strong disincentive for the staff to ever use the facility, whatever facility it is. I think that’s the most important fact, that it really is – it has to be hard work for the staff to put the kid into that facility, so that the hard work of keeping them out of the facility becomes a realistic option. If it’s really easy to lock the kid up and really hard to de-escalate them then, by nature, people will lean towards the locking up option.

Yes?---If people are really supportive and becoming good at – and proud about being able to do de-escalation, and there’s a strong sanction against putting kids into a lock up, then they will choose the option – they will exhaust the option of de-escalation before they lock the kid up.

I understand. Thank you. Those are all the questions I have for you, for the moment, but as I say could you stay on the line because there are others.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Dr Jureidini, it’s Commissioner White speaking. You have partially dealt with the question that I wanted to raise with you in that last answer, but in the course of the Commission’s hearings we have heard from numbers of young people or others associated with them that there would be many attempts at self-harm within the detention setting. In some cases, there has been an explanation


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from the young person that it was in order to get youth justice officers to listen to them, because they could not otherwise get their attention. Others, there were serious acts of despair. Is there any way in which the youth justice officers who have the daily management of these young people could realistically distinguish between the two groups?---Sorry, before I answer that can I just say that in relation to putting people into – you know, seclusion or whatever, that self-harm is never, in my view, a justification for doing that. So the idea that you put somebody in there to stop them hurting themselves is – that’s never acceptable. So – you know, the only reason for putting somebody in seclusion that they are – you know, that they’re dangerous and in need for a short period to secure everybody’s safety by getting them out of harm’s way, getting other people out of their way. Just to – so to come back to your question, I don’t think there is – I mean, young people might say that if there’s a neat distinction between, you know, “Sometimes I do things because I need to be listened to and sometimes I do things because I’m genuinely feeling self-destructive,” I think that every act of self-harm contains both of those elements. You know, that there is a sense of – not necessarily see suicidal intent, but wanting to hurt, punish themselves as well as wanting somebody to listen. That these are – self-harm is a communicative behaviour. So it’s not that important that the – that the juvenile justice officers learn to make a distinction. In fact, it’s probably not desirable having them worry about whether this is or isn’t a genuinely self-destructive act. It’s better to have them listen to the distressed young person’s experience, and try to make sense of that, and be supportive in making sense of that. Because it’s not – you wouldn’t expect an ordinary parent to be able to make sense of a child’s self-harming behaviour, you would expect an ordinary parent to be able to go to somebody like me and have a conversation about what is going on and help – you know, be helped to understand it. So, in just the same way, youth justice officers need support from mental health services to work collaboratively, not to have a sense that okay, this is a mental health problem, they need expert mental health treatment – which many kids don’t want, are hostile to. What the kids need is for the staff to act in a parental way towards them, and in order to act in a parental way towards someone who is engaging in all kinds of ugly and horrible behaviour you need support from people like me to just get through the day. So that’s where the need for our services to be much more responsive and available to youth justice comes in.

Thank you. And, Dr Jureidini, many of these examples, so far as we have heard arise very quickly and probably they arise very quickly in the general population where they exist. Would it be desirable to have available, on site, a mental health trained person, not necessarily a medical practitioner. That might – for the numbers here, that might be extreme, but to have perhaps a nurse, but trained in mental health with children and adolescents on site?---I think there are pros and cons with that. I think the ideal for me is for – rather than to have somebody – I think it becomes a problem if every problem – every difficulty is referred to the nurse to sort out. Because that ..... too strong from the youth justice officers. So I think the best model is to have available – to have regular well-structured handover activities so that each day or at the end of each shift there’s available support from the mental health person to debrief about what has happened during that shift and set plans for the following shift, etcetera. So, provided the role of the mental health worker on site is to support


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– is primarily – I mean, there will be some direct face-to-face work, but primarily to support the juvenile justice staff in their parental role, rather than to replace them when things get difficult.

Thank you. I have one other area that I would just like your views about. We have heard from numbers of youth justice officer workers, who have been through the system over many years, that most of the young people who come into their care are addicted either to nicotine, to alcohol, or illicit drugs, or indeed all of them together, and the management of the withdrawing behaviour is quite difficult, but does not seem to be recognised so far as the evidence goes, that that is what they are dealing with, with these young people. Have you got any suggestions to deal with those sorts of things?---Yes. I mean I think the – and it’s probably unusual that you have – most commonly the kids who are using those kinds of drugs won’t be having very severe physical withdrawal from them, but it’s more that they’re in – their kind of hangover state is a very unpleasant emotional state, and just adds to the distress and lack of capacity to manage their own behaviour that is created when they come into the new environment. And being mindful of, I guess, making an assumption that that kid – any kid who comes into detention is likely to be withdrawing in that broader sense, not necessarily physically addicted, but withdrawing in that broader sense. I think building that into our approaches to caring for young people, making sure that they’re – you know, well hydrated and – you know, fed and all those kinds of things, that are about getting them into the best possible physical state, so that you optimise their mental state. I think – I guess in short, I agree that giving a lot of attention to what drugs a kid might have been using before they came in is an important part of the initial assessment.

Thank you?---And having medical advice about it. I mean, I think it’s rarely an acute medical issue, but I think having medical advice and guidance with somebody experienced in drug and alcohol issues is useful.

Thank you. Now we are going into closed court for your questions.

MR O’CONNELL: Yes.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: That might take us a little while. We have no other questions. Dr Jureidini, we are going to move into closed court for some questions which one of the counsel who has been given leave to ask you questions wishes to asks. So that will take a short time to do that. I think it will take about 10 minutes or so. Can we do that by going offline for that period and then getting you back and then it will be quite short, we won’t take long?---Okay. So you want me to hang up and dial back in or just wait?

COMMISSIONER WHITE: I will ask counsel what’s the best way to do it.

MR CALLAGHAN: Just stay on the line, if that’s possible.


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COMMISSIONER WHITE: The advice from the technical people here is could you kindly stay on the line?---Okay.

Thank you. We – should we adjourn then while that’s happening?

MR CALLAGHAN: We just adjourn while that is happening. And we might mute it as well.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: We will wait to hear then. 10 minutes.

<THE WITNESS WITHDREW

ADJOURNED [3.23 pm]

CLOSED SESSION ENSUED

[REDACTED INFORMATION]

PUBLIC SESSION RESUMED

RESUMED [4.19 pm]

MR CALLAGHAN: I call Dr Denise Riordan.

<DENISE RIORDAN, SWORN [4.19 pm]

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Kindly be seated, thank you?---Thank you.

<EXAMINATION-IN-CHIEF BY MR CALLAGHAN [4.20 pm]

MR CALLAGHAN: For the record, could you tell the Commission your full name please?---My name is Dr Denise Mary Riordan.

Dr Riordan you’ve prepared a statement dated 22 June 2017; is that correct?---I think it’s dated 21 June, but yes.

.ROYAL COMMISSION 29.6.17 P-5344 D. RIORDAN XN©Commonwealth of Australia MR CALLAGHAN

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Signed on the 22nd.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Signed on the 22nd?---Signed on the 22nd, thank you, yes.

MR CALLAGHAN: I tender that.


EXHIBIT #642 STATEMENT OF DENISE RIORDAN DATED 22/06/2017

MR CALLAGHAN: Your qualifications and CV and position are all outlined in the statement, so we might just go straight to some of the content. Can I take you to paragraphs 20 to 22, where you refer to some of the special vulnerable abilities to apply to Indigenous children in particular and suggest, I think, that they should inform all aspects of service development and care delivery. Beyond that proposition being reflected in policy, can you elaborate as to how specifically that should happen?---I think that it’s really important that that is kind of reflected on a day-by-day basis in terms of how our services are delivered. So I think that that starts in terms of the – you know, a really good set of training and understanding that any of people working across our services have about the population and the demographics of the population that they’re working with. And I think that that sort of training and understanding needs to be something that is very much at the forefront of all of the work we do in terms of assessment, in terms of how we configure and deliver services, and indeed in terms of how we evaluate the effectiveness of any of the services that we are delivering.

Thank you. Can I take you to paragraph 57, where you note there is currently no capacity for your services to deliver mental health services within the detention centres. By the phrase “our services” that you use in paragraph 57 you mean Department of Health Services?---I do mean the Department of Health services. I think, to be much more specific, I’m talking there about the Child and Adolescent Mental Health team have indicated to me that they don’t have the resources to be physically present in the service on a regular day-by-day basis. They do provide a level of consultation, but they’re not able to – they don’t have the resources to do that.

COMMISSIONER GOODA: Is it purely a resource issue, doctor?---My understanding is that it is a resource issue. I don’t have any indication to suggest that it’s an unwillingness, or a sense of not having adequate skills or training, it just is that in terms of the prioritising of service delivery – and they’ve attempted to provide a level of support by providing consultation, telephone access and there has more recently, through primary care, been the appointment of a psychologist into the detention centre in Top End, here in Darwin, who also gets support from that team. And in addition, the primary health care service have also got a position for a full-


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time nurse. There isn’t a substantive person in that post at the moment, but they are working towards getting that.

I was going to ask: is it a financial resource issue or is it a personnel issue, you don’t have the people?---I think, as is often the case in a lot of things to do with child and adolescent mental health, it’s often a combination of both. So it’s about that sort of – yes, there is a financial resource issue but then having people with the right skills and expertise at the right level.

For instance, I was at a community – attended a court session and the magistrate was told there was no neuropsychologist in the Northern Territory?---That is – that is the case. That it – it doesn’t surprise me to hear that. It’s very sad that that is the case, but that is the case. It’s – I suppose I just come from working in the ACT where, in a centre like the ACT with proximity to services in Sydney we would also struggle there to get, for example, a neuropsychology or neuropsychiatry report, but those issues are much more magnified here in the Territory and one could argue that the need, particularly around some of the complexity of presentation – so, for example, children and young people where there may be a concern that they’re suffering from, for example, foetal alcohol syndrome disorder, where having a really good understanding of their level of cognitive functioning, the different sort of profiles of their functioning, so what are their areas of strength, what are their areas of relative weakness, in order to then not only carry out a well-informed and developmentally appropriate assessment but how to then deliver services in the most appropriate way is going to be very significantly impacted on in the absence of that assessment.

Thank you.

MR CALLAGHAN: Can I pick up directly though on Commissioner Gooda’s questions about resourcing, and your own observations about difficulties in attracting staff. At paragraph 59 you inform that the extent to which the CAMHT is funded, but are all those positions filled?---In the – my understanding, as of a conversation with that team two weeks ago, is I think they might have – sorry, I’m just looking at this. This is the Darwin – yes, sorry, the Top End.

Yes?---Yes, I think that they do have a couple of vacancies on that team.

Because one of the things we have heard about is the difficulties in attracting staff?---Yes. And, again, I think that that’s right. There are – again, having worked in child and adolescent mental health specifically as a specialty for well over 20 years, it is historically a specialty that has had difficulty recruiting staff from a whole range of disciplines, and that continues to be the case. And I think that, again, here in the Northern Territory where there are then the challenges associated, I guess, with the geography and the distance, perhaps from other centres. I guess it’s also some of those challenges are linked to the fact that people may feel that they have limited opportunities for career progression. Often, the other sort of things that attract staff would be things like well-established sort of research development framework and the opportunity to get involved in a range of projects. I would certainly feel very


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strongly that there is all of the potential to be developing those here, but I think that it’s about having a framework within which to do that. Obviously, the presence of the medical school at Charles Darwin University provides a really good opportunity. I know that the Royal Australian New Zealand College of Psychiatrists works very hard to encourage medical students and junior doctors to think about psychiatry as a specialty and that within that then I know that child and adolescent psychiatrists, we are usually very, very good at sort of proselytising on behalf of our profession, but it is a challenge.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: And yet you might have thought that the challenges of the Northern Territory in fact would be very interesting for young researchers, because there’s a wealth of work here to be done and very career advancing, one might think?---One would absolutely think and hope that. I think that it is then about the potential of sort of organising sort of employment opportunities that provide a balance between providing good clinical service and using that as a sort of framework within which they can be – I guess what I think of, and is referred to, as embedded research: that research that comes out of clinical practice.

And does your appointment here, Dr Riordan, permit you to play a part perhaps in developing that sort of advocacy for recruitment and working with Charles Darwin?---I think I would be derelict in my duty if I didn’t use every opportunity that comes my way and create as many opportunities to have that. The role that I do have though, to be very explicit, is as the chief psychiatrist for the whole of the Northern Territory. So that does cover the whole of mental health, right across the Territory, and the whole of alcohol and other drug services. So it’s already a fair broad remit. Obviously, I bring to that particular skills and expertise as a child and adolescent psychiatrist, and would want to be very proactive in using that. But there isn’t a specific component of the job that is designed around child and adolescent psychiatry at this point. I think it’s also fair to say, though, that my appointment as chief psychiatrist in the Northern Territory is the first full-time chief psychiatrist that the Northern Territory has had. I’ve only been in the role about four months and I think that, for both myself as a professional and I think for our service, which has been very supportive of wanting to develop the role of the chief psychiatrist, I think that we are aware that, you know, we need to kind of grow the role and look at how best to make use of the resource that I would bring, and use that to really enhance and help develop those areas of greatest need in terms of mental health and alcohol and other drug services in the Territory.

It is – we accept that it’s a very huge role and need, although it might be tempting to observe that managing the mental health needs of children and young people might mean that you didn’t have so many in the adult sector?---I think that I would absolutely agree with that, and all of the evidence supports that. The evidence is that – you know, if we were better as a system, and that would be a health system in any jurisdiction, but if we were better and more targeted at having really good prevention services, really good early intervention services – and by early intervention I’m thinking of early in years, I think early intervention has become a term that has become sort of used in a couple of ways. So people increasingly have used the term


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to talk about early intervention for psychosis. That’s very important, early intervention, but it should never come at the expense of early intervention around early years, working with – ideally working with women and families, before they become pregnant and early years in terms of childhood, working very, very collaboratively with education. I think that that’s an incredible prevention, child health, mental health services to be working collaboratively, and on through middle childhood and beyond. Adolescence brings with it its own very unique and special challenges, and again there are so many opportunities there. So yes, I think if we were investing more in that, then the rates of adult onset illness, we would start to see those reduce. We know that most adults with mental illness have had their illness start in their teenage years, and sometimes earlier. We know that a lot of the illnesses, or a lot of the childhood conditions – so things like behavioural disorders, conduct disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or oppositional defiant disorder, we know that they in and of themselves increase the risk to form other illnesses. So absolutely.

MR CALLAGHAN: Can we bring the wider conversation about mental illness within the detention context and, perhaps to cut straight to the point, go to paragraph 76 – because we don’t need to rehearsal that you’ve written before that, but your conclusion is that unless there’s significant change to the system – well, we can read what’s said there. By system, are you talking – you are referring to the system of youth detention as operating currently in the Northern Territory?---I think I’m referring to it in – sort of in relation to the Northern Territory. I think that the issues that are raised would apply more generally as well, but I think that, you know, if I just go back over the sorts of points that I raise, that whole process of removing children, children being isolated, children and young people, I think that there are real risks that we will continue to impact adversely on the mental health and wellbeing of children and on their social outcomes.

Perhaps just focusing on the paragraph, the restrictive practices that you talk about that are highly traumatising. Is there any – given what you have said there, is there any rational basis that justifies their continued use? I mean even things that are done supposedly for a child’s own safety, if they’re traumatising then they’re creating another safety risk or other safety risks of damage to the mental health and creating the potential for self-harm. So can they continue to be justified?---I think that it would be fair to say that the Royal College of Psychiatrists and all of the jurisdictions across Australia have worked extremely hard in the mental health space to significantly reduce the impact – or to reduce the practice of seclusion and restraint, because it has been seen as such a damaging – a damaging experience. And I think that – we certainly know that there are other, far better, ways of dealing with a young people who is distressed and vulnerable. And arguably doing that by allowing them to remain engaged in the sort of social kind of environment that they’re in – so if it is within a detention centre, being able to provide extra support to a young person rather than taking them away and just leaving them in isolation, is absolutely going to be much better for them. When we put young people into seclusion what we are doing, effectively, is not only depriving them from any kind of source of support, we are leaving them with all of those negative thoughts and distressing images that they


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will be carrying with them. And we’re also absolutely taking away from them a lot of the sort of mechanisms and coping strategies that might help them to be able to self-soothe and to be able to accept the support and the soothing of other people. So I do think that it is really important that we look at having adequate resources, within any setting that we have young people, to make sure that if there are episodes of distress that we can manage that. It is a real hard challenge, I think, when you have a young person whose behaviour is very externalised, that they are so overwhelmed by their distress that all they can do at that point in time is to externalise that behaviour. I think it’s absolutely imperative that we look at having the right supports. There may need to be a kind of a safer space. We talk in hospitals about using what we call de-escalation suites. That isn’t a room where somebody is isolated; it is a kind of – a quiet area where there may be things that are specifically designed to be help a young person to self-soothe and to be able manage their distress. A really important aspect of that is for any people coming into – I guess, in a setting in the hospital, a setting that could equally be something that could apply in a detention setting is to actually have a discussion with a young person, ideally with their family and carers as well about, “If you get distressed, how do you know you’re getting distressed? What things help when you get distressed? What would be our plan if you get distressed? How would you let people know? How could we respond?” So I think there’s a lot of very positive, very proactive strategies that can be used that would hopefully mean that these restrictive practices become something of the past.

Thank you. Can I take you to paragraph 91 and ask you about the circumstances in which, on extremely rare occasions, medication might be prescribed for behavioural issues. Allowing that you say that they’re extremely rare, what would they be?---It may be that, for example – I guess and I’m thinking about situations where young people may have high levels of anxiety and agitation that may, for example, lead to – you know, either sort of restless pacing that becomes quite out of control, or people may start picking at their skin, things like that that can actually cause them quite a bit of damage. And it may be appropriate under some settings to, in the context – and always I stress this really emphatically, always in the context of there having been a comprehensive clinical assessment, to think about would medication help this young person in a very sort of time limited way to manage some of that distress? It would need to be, I think, something that is considered very carefully and with, I say within the context of a comprehensive assessment, and with a very clear plan that we are not just using medication here, that we are using a range of other sort of psychological and social support systems. If somebody were in that situation, I think it would be absolutely imperative that there was a consideration that, you know, is this environment contributing to this young person’s level of distress? Does this young person have such a level of distress that they might need – there might need to be consideration of hospitalisation or another form of environment that they could be cared for? I think that the part of my rationale and the reason for putting that in is to say that I think it’s really important to never say never. I think that, you know, by saying we would never use medication, I think we could be kind of not doing a child or a young people the best service. Equally though, we shouldn’t be king of using it in a liberal sense. So I guess it’s also about that having a very specific kind of


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understanding of an individual as an individual with very specific needs at this point in time.

And in that situation, or indeed in any situation where medication is being prescribed for a mental health issue, what is the situation as regards consent with children in detention?---The rationale around consent for children in detention should arguably be exactly the same as for consent in any other situation. So if a young person is deemed able to give consent – so they can understand, you know, what the medication is being prescribed for, what are its potential benefits, what are the potential side effects associated with that medication, what is the risk of making medication, what are the risks of not having medication? And ideally, as well ,they should be discussion around exactly the same issues with the parent or carer, where that is possible. And it should only then be that if a young person consents to that medication that they should be having that medication. If there was a situation where it was felt that a young person absolutely needed medication, and they did not consent to medication, then I think there would have to be very due diligence done around consideration about does this child need to be treated under the Mental Health Act? If that is what you think, then that child should not be treated in a detention facility. If they’ve receiving medical treatment in that situation then it should be medical treatment that is provided within a gazetted mental health facility.

And what if the guardian or the person in the place of the parent is the chief executive of Territory Families, what is the procedure?---I would have to be very honest and say that I haven’t given specific consideration to that. I think that ideally there should be a consideration – you know, there should be that same discussion with the chief executive of Territory Families. That would still, I think, not remove the obligation as far as possible from still involving family and community members in relation to that.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: In any event, it would be likely that there would be a delegation of powers to the superintendent of the relevant centre, the chief executive, and one could anticipate that there is something of a tension there between the person who is trying to run the facility in an orderly way and making that decision on behalf of a young person?---Yep. In those situations, I think that the real tension would be about what is the purpose of this medication, because the purpose of medication would be to treat targeted symptoms that a young person is exhibiting. They would not be to contribute to the orderly running of a detention centre. It has to be a decision that is made about, you know, this young person and what do we think this medication is going to do to be of assistance to that young person?

MR CALLAGHAN: But that is the point that I think arises from Commissioner White question, is that whilst that’s the ideal, certainly, and there’s no argument there are conflicting duties, I’m not saying it would necessarily – anyone would necessarily abdicate their duties, but the superintendent does have the duty to maintain the orderly running of the centre. If delegated with the duty to consent or otherwise, there is that tension between those obligations, is there not?---There is likely to be a tension between those obligations but I think it’s then the responsibility


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of, in this instance, the medical practitioner to be clear all of the time in their dealings that they are making recommendations that are in the best interests of the child. If the superintendent were not happy with that decision, then I think that they would need to have a very clear discussion about that. But I think as a medical professional my duty and responsibility is to, in the first instance do no harm, and to absolutely have, you know, client-centred care and consideration, and just to be working towards them – towards meeting their needs.

That’s all I had for Dr Riordan, for the moment. There are others who have leave to question, I think.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Yes, thank you. I think we have, Dr Dwyer.

<CROSS-EXAMINATION BY DR DWYER [4.46 pm]

DR DWYER: Dr Riordan, my name is Peggy Dwyer, I appear for NAAJA, the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency. At paragraph 13 of your report you refer to a high level clinical governance committee that would sit across Territory Families, and that’s something that has recently been discussed with you by the deputy chief executive officer of Territory Families is that right?---That’s correct, yes.

That body is not yet established; is that correct?---That’s right. The conversation I had with the deputy chief executive of Territory Families was – I can’t remember the exact date but it was within the last sort of few weeks and it was out – it was a discussion around how to move forward in terms of trying to provide much better sort of services and oversight across the range of care that is provided for children and young people in detention. And the discussion was around whether, I suppose, the component of discussion that I had specifically was whether that is something that the Department of Health and myself as chief psychiatrist would be supportive of, and be keen to contribute to, and certainly my indication was that it absolutely was.

Do you know whether or not that committee at the moment is proposed to have representation from AMSANT or Danila Dilba, or any of those Aboriginal organisations?---In the discussion that we had there was not a specific discussion around other agencies, other than to make reference to the fact that it would be a high level group that would bring together a group of people from a range of different agencies and with different expertise. I would have to be honest and say, having heard the question, my assumption at the time was that there undoubtedly be Aboriginal organisation representatives on that, and that is certainly something that I would be advocating. The reason for advocating that is I fail to see how we could genuinely say we have a high level clinical governance sort of structure that was not truly representative. It would be an oxymoron. So that is something that I would be advocating.

.ROYAL COMMISSION 29.6.17 P-5351 D. RIORDAN XXN©Commonwealth of Australia DR DWYER

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And, Dr Riordan, can I refer you to paragraph 148 of your statement – I beg your pardon, paragraph 149 of your statement where you talk about a cross-agency action group. That’s something different; is that right?---That is something different. So that is an action group that is already in existence. I think that the first meeting of that probably took place in March and it is a group that aims to meet monthly. That has representation from a range of government agencies. I know very specifically that Danila Dilba are also involved in that – in that group. And that aims to meet monthly.

Is it cross-agency action group just focused on groups that specialise in health care?---No. I can advise you that Territory Families chair that group. It also has representation from a range of agencies, the Department of the Chief Minister, Department of Housing, Department of Education, Department of Attorney-General and Justice, Territory police, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Danila Dilba, the Northern Territory Council of Social Services, Office of the Commissioner and the Youth Advisory Committee.

And no legal services represented in there; is that correct?---The membership list that I have in front of me that comes from the draft of the terms of reference mentions the Department of the Attorney-General and Justice, but no other legal agency.

Can you see the value in having agencies like NAAJA or the Legal Aid Commission or the DPP in that group or not?---I can certainly see the value that such representation would bring. There is always a tension in groups that when a working group gets – or when an advisory group gets too large it can sort of lose some of its effectiveness, so I think there’s a real challenge to making sure you get the right representation. And I would argue that the representation that you’re suggesting would be very relevant. In my – I mean, as I’ve indicated already, there is a fairly newly formed group, and I think it is very open at this point in time to suggestion about who might be the right sort of composite – what might be the right composition of that group.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: You could already say it is already pretty big?---It is already pretty big. And - - -

So putting in something – an organisation like Legal Aid or NAAJA will bring a different level of expertise to it, but it’s not going to add appreciably to the too big size?---Yes. I think that there is that tendency. As the group evolves and matures it may be that we work towards a structure that has potentially a smaller core group with the kind of capacity to, you know, pull in additional expertise or to work across agencies as is needed. I think that – you know, as I said, at most this group is three months old. So I think that it’s always a challenge, I feel to kind of want groups to kind of get on and start doing things. But at the same time, you know, there’s a risk that if you rush things you miss out on some important aspects. Hopefully it will be a group that will evolve and mature at a rate that allows it, with all the other work that is being done, to address the issues that it is setting out to address.


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Which government department owns or ministry industry owns this particular - - -?---Territory Families.

Yes. Thank you?---So it is chaired by Territory Families.

Thank you.

DR DWYER: Dr Riordan, you refer in your statement to – I’m summarising – that there’s a significant shared client population between children and youth services, or children and youth who use CAMHS and children and youth who use Territory Families; you would agree with that?---Yes. I would agree with that.

And there’s shared clientele between mental health clients and young people in the youth justice system?---Just to clarify that, I think that there are certainly young people who are known to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services who have – who are in the detention centre, yes.

You would agree with the sentiment that children and families with complex needs should drive a whole of service response?---I think that the complexity of the needs – and obviously, as you’ve indicated, there are the children in out-of-home care and under care and protection services, children in detention, some of these groups will be – will overlap. I don’t think that there is any single agency that has the capacity to meet the needs of any of these children, and I think any agency that thought it did would struggle. I think that absolutely it needs to be a cross-agency response to get the best configuration of services around individual children and families. Also around individual communities, because some of the needs that children and young people present with reflect, at a sort of individual level, some of the broader needs of their community. So absolutely needs a cross-agency and multi-agency response.

And, Dr Riordan, what you say at paragraph 54 of your statement is that there is a fragmentation, in effect, of those services; correct?---In paragraph 54, I am making reference specifically to the Central Australian child and youth mental health services, and - - -

I see?--- - - - the comment that I made there was based on the advice that I had been given in consultation with colleagues working in that service. So they felt that, you know, they might be asked to see some children; other children might go to another part of the service; they might find that children they were also were also being seen by another service, and it was that – there was a sense that that sort of level of fragmentation meant that maybe optimal outcomes were not being achieved, because of the fact that people weren’t necessarily working in a concerted manner.

And do you think in the Top End there’s that fragmentation also in the sense that there are Territory Families, there are NGOs, there are different staff working across organisations with various levels of training and different therapeutic approaches?---I think that with any kind of service that is aiming to meet the – you know, broad array of mental health, social and emotional wellbeing needs of young children – of


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children and young people, there do need to be a variety of services to be offered. So the concern is really not so much that there is a range of services. Arguably having a range of services gives people and families better choice. It can allow for different levels of accessibility. The challenge is to really make sure that there’s a model of care sitting around all of that that allows for there to be coordination amongst those groups, so that there isn’t duplication of services so that families and children don’t feel overwhelmed that they’ve either got this incredible sort of array of services that they just can’t find their way around. Or that, you know, that everybody is saying, “This isn’t our responsibility, this needs to go somewhere else.” So it’s more about that, trying to make sure that there is a model of care which allows those services to best deliver the particular sort of therapeutic interventions that they have on offer, and to do that in a coherent and consistent and predictable way.

Dr Riordan, do you accept that another problem in terms of the fragmentation or the need for integration is that with a changing workforce in the Northern Territory you might have somebody doing an assessment and identifying the children’s needs, but not knowing how to meet those needs in terms of the array of services that might be available?---I think that that is always – you know, a very real possibility. I think that in a well-integrated service there needs to be that sort of – yeah, there needs to be some way of tracking what are the services and what are the skills available within those services. Certainly, the issue of staff recruitment and retention that we have already discussed will remain. Obviously, one of the ways to best reduce some of that sort of turnover of staff and – is to have a kind of, you know, a working environment and a working framework that people feel both supported in and that they feel is cohesive. So by addressing some of that sort of cohesion, or some of that need for cohesion and trying to pull things together, we actually have the opportunity to stabilise, to an agree, the workforce. There’s always going to be a level of turnover of staff, and I think that we have to accept that, but I think it’s then about having turnover for the right reasons. So if we’re having sort of staff progressing through careers, and progressing through services because of their development, and – but remaining within the area and developing and maturing a workforce, that’s a good thing. The challenge is when you’ve got that turnover where people just get burnt out very quickly.

Sorry, your Honour. I’m conscious – I’m getting times up noises, but these are – I’m loath to cut Dr Riordan off. But Dr Riordan – so, your Honour, might I just have a few more minutes.


DR DWYER: Dr Riordan, one of your three citizenships involves an Irish citizenship, can I ask you if you are particular with the task force in Ireland that reported around 2012, following inquiries into the treatment of children?---With – this was the treatment of children in institutions?

Yes?---Yes. I – when I say I am, I am aware of it and I have some familiarity with it, I wouldn’t at all profess, you know, a tremendous level of expertise around it.


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Let me ask you this quick question, then. Please tell us if you can or can’t answer it. That inquiry resulted in the creation of a child and family support agency, which sat across a number of different service providers including public health nursing, speech and language therapy, child and adolescent mental health services, psychology services, so that there was an education – so that there was an integrated service provider. Are you able to comment on whether that’s a useful model to think about in the Northern Territory?---I think it absolutely would be an important model to think about, and I think that any model that brings together the range of agencies that work across that sort of early years into adolescence and young adulthood has got the potential to have an awful lot of benefits. I think the – you know, the fact that this process has been developed and set out in Ireland, and I would be very honest in saying it is not dissimilar to the way that services are also configured across some of the jurisdictions or some of the local authorities in the UK. I think it certainly has a lot of potential and, in a sense, if the Territory were to think about that as the potential approach, it does then have the benefit of, you know, taking advantage of other people’s experiences and looking for what were the strengths of those services, what worked well, what lessons were learnt from that, so that we don’t actually have to go back, if that were an approach that the Territory took, that the Territory wouldn’t have to go right back to the drawing board.

Your Honour, I’m about to be struck by my learned friend.

MR CALLAGHAN: No. I’m sorry, we have got another witness.

DR DWYER: I will leave it there. Thank you.


<CROSS-EXAMINATION BY MS GRAHAM [5.02 pm]

MS GRAHAM: Dr Riordan, my name is Felicity Graham and I appear for CAALAS. You recognise that culture is central to health and wellbeing; that’s right?---Absolutely, yes.

And that genuine partnerships and collaboration based on respect for Aboriginal people and their cultures are fundamental in developing and delivering services here in the Northern Territory?---Yes.

And that’s not only on a personal level, but on an organisational level. Do you agree with that?---Absolutely, yes.

In the health space you’re aware that many remote communities in the Northern Territory have Aboriginal community controlled health clinics delivering services on country; is that right?---I am aware of that.

.ROYAL COMMISSION 29.6.17 P-5355 D. RIORDAN XXN©Commonwealth of Australia MS GRAHAM

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And we spoke out of court about a clinic Ampilitwatja, which for the assistance of the transcriber is not exactly spelt how it sounds, it’s A-m-p-i-l-i-t-w-a-t-j-a. Which delivers health to the people of Ampilitwatja, including a bush medicine health service. That an example of, at an organisational level, how genuine partnerships and collaboration can be achieved to improve the kind of service for Aboriginal people?---Obviously, what I don’t have is any understanding of how that sort of partnership evolved, but the fact that it has evolved would certainly, you know, strongly suggest and endorse the fact that it is a very good sort of outcome and partnership. And I guess it would also be just important, within the context of that to know – and I guess at one level I’m making an assumption that they work very, very well together, because – you know, there is always the possibility that you can have two services working in the same location. What you really want to know is how integrated are they and certainly where there is good integration and there is – you know, shared understanding, shared bringing together of services, and absolutely sort of mutual respect, then that is a very good outcome to have.

And it’s likely to increase people’s access to health services, do you agree with that?---People are going to absolutely feel much more comfortable about accessing services where they feel confident that the service is going to understand them, is going to respect them, and that they’re going to have a range of options and – you know, in this instance I guess, to use a little bit of jargon, better therapies or, you know, on offer.

And getting people in the door is one thing, but collaborating in this kind of way is also likely to increase the effectiveness of the care that is delivered to people who access the health service. Do you agree with that?---Wherever there is collaboration happening, then that is – because that becomes something, I think, that people become aware of. Then, you know, it’s going to lead to an organisational culture that I would argue, yes, is going to make people feel much more confident about engaging with, and working with.

Moving into the detention setting, would you support a health care model that includes bush medicine or Aboriginal healing practices being available to children kept there?---One of the things that I’ve mentioned in my report, and something that I feel very strongly about, is that children and young people in detention or in care settings should have the right to equivalence of health services. So what I mean by that is they should be able to access and get the same sort of care that they should be able to access in their community. So I guess, just to be very pedantic about that, if a child came into a detention centre who didn’t have access to bush medicine in their community that they should still – if they want to be able to access in a detention centre, they should still be able to access that. I think that that sense of offering to children and young people in detention the best level of care that is available, and that would be available to other children in the broader community, is paramount to treating children and young people in detention with the respect and the dignity that they deserve.


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You speak at paragraph 73 of your report about the importance of attachment figures. We don’t perhaps need to go to exactly what you set out there. But in terms of children in detention, particularly experiencing some crisis or mental distress, what’s your view about the role attachment figures should be playing in terms of being able to come into the centre and assist in the soothing of children in distress, or in crisis?---I think that’s something that’s really absolutely crucial. I guess the best sort of way to try and explain it is that if we think about children who – and you know, we recognise that children going into detention centres, it’s often, you know, it’s not – it’s a sudden event, often on the background of levels of stress and distress, possibly in the run-up to the events that led to them being admitted to the detention centre and the whole process itself would be. So it’s a highly stressful experience for young people. An analogous highly stressful experience for a young person would be, you know, a young person who was going into hospital because they were sick. If a young person was being taken into hospital because they were sick, they would also have that sort of – you know, taken away from their normal environment, in a strange environment, strange and difficult things happening. We would expect, and encourage, and be somewhat concerned if they did not have access to their attachment figures in those settings. We would recognise the importance of having regular access, ideally constant access – that may not be, you know, something that can be achieved in a detention setting, but certainly we would see that regular access was going to be really important in supporting them, supporting their mental health and wellbeing and facilitating their recovery. In a detention centre those same principles, I believe very firmly, apply. Children and young people coming into detention may already have tenuous attachment relationships anyway. So it’s even – it’s arguably even more important to protect them and to rebuild them where necessary. Children and young people coming into detention centres ideally are going to be there for absolutely the shortest space of time possible. They’re going to be returning to those attachment figures. If those attachment figures haven’t been available, that’s likely to increase the distress and frustration, arguably the anger, of a young person. So I think it is absolutely beholden on the service as a whole to do everything in its power to make sure that there are opportunities for that attachment to continue. Ideally by visits, that’s obviously the sort of gold standard. If that cannot be managed then certainly by, you know, using technology, using telephone calls, Skype, video conferencing. Using things to build on those connections. Recently, I had the opportunity to visit Don Dale and was there talking to a young girl, a young woman who was there, and she had just had the opportunity to have a contact visit with her child and that was a visit that was happening every day for her. And talking to her about how important that was for her, and recognising how equally important that was for her infant. So that was an example of what we’re talking about here, you know, a generation down, as it were. But, you know, it was absolutely critical for that young person, and arguably even more critical for her infant, to be having that contact. So we know that that can happen and it can be supported. That’s certainly something that we should absolutely be prioritising.

Dr Riordan, I’m told to wind up, so I’ve got one final question for you and it’s a very important one: how does an experience of racism experienced by a child impact on their mental health and behaviour?---It is an absolutely critical important question


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and I guess it’s something one could spend, you know, a lot of time talking about. So I’m mindful of time as well for people. So - - -

COMMISSIONER WHITE: It’s not so much – the constraints are that we have a witness from the United kingdom Kingdom who is waiting on line for us?---Yes, I am very aware of that, I’m very mindful of that.

Might need the short answer to this one, although - - -?---The short answer would be that if a young person has experienced racism and particularly – racism is rarely an isolated one-off event. It is usually systemic and systematic and for a lot of – for Aboriginal people it’s also transgenerational. All of those things are going to have an incredibly negative impact on that individual’s self-esteem, their self-worth, how they relate to others. It’s also going to influence the way that they perceive the world, and therefore their perception of how others are going to treat them. It’s going to have a very negative impact on them and it’s going to set up, understandably, a level of assumption about how they might expect to be treated. And that’s going to make things so much more challenging and difficult for them. You know, racism at an – you know, experienced both individually and then as a community and, broader than that, as a kind of racial group – and recognising that there are many different racial groups within our Aboriginal community – is going to be so destructive. Our organisations have to be – and I say this speaking on behalf of health but I feel very confident that it would be something that would be echoed by – right across government – is we have to be very, very mindful at every level of our intervention about the extent to – not only are we being aware of the impacts of racism on people but that we’re also incredibly mindful about making sure that we’re doing everything possible to not be repeating that in any of the ways our organisations function.

Thank you. Thanks, Mrs Graham.

MR CALLAGHAN: Nothing further, Commissioners. May Dr Riordan be excused.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Indeed, she may be excused. I thought you might have been getting ready. Dr Riordan, Commissioner Gooda and I are most grateful to you for taking the trouble to put together your statement for us. That, of course, is very useful and your evidence today, which has elaborated on some areas of great interest to us, has been very important evidence. We thank you very much for coming here to assist us. We are sorry that we can’t explore some of these things at greater length which probably need to be explored at greater length, but we are governed by some time constraints?---I fully appreciate that. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

COMMISSIONER GOODA: Thank you.


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MR CALLAGHAN: I believe Mr Taylor is on the line. Mr McAvoy is poised.

MR McAVOY: Good afternoon, Commissioners. I understand that Mr Taylor is on the line.

<CHARLES PEREGRINE KERWIN TAYLOR, CALLED [5.15 pm]

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Can we – he’s – we are getting a picture as well. Excellent. Mr Taylor?---Good morning.

Are we getting through to you?---Yes, certainly. Can you hear me okay?

Right. Thank you. Well, I’m Commissioner White and this is Commissioner Gooda, and thank you very much for accepting the invitation of the Commission to assist us with the work that we’re doing in undertaking our terms of reference. Can I say straightaway that we do apologise for keeping you on the line, as it were, dangling for so long. You would probably know that a lot of these things run over time. We had some technical hitches this morning of some magnitude that put our program back a bit. So we are very pleased to welcome you to our Commission?---Well, thank you very much for having me.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Thank, Mr McAvoy.

MR McAVOY: Thank you.

Mr Taylor, could I just tell the Commissioners your full name?---My name is Charlie – Charles Peregrine Kerwin Taylor. Charlie Taylor.

And you are chair of the Youth Justice Board of England and Wales?---Correct.

And you’ve prepared – there’s a précis of your evidence been prepared. If we could show Mr Taylor that on the screen. Can you see that document?---Yes, indeed.

And do you recognise that document?---I do indeed, yes.

And, indeed, your signature appears on page 8 of that document?---That’s right.

Thank you. Commissioners, I tender the précis of evidence from Mr Taylor, together with annexure A, which is his curriculum vitae.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Thank you. The précis of Mr Taylor’s evidence is exhibit 643.

.ROYAL COMMISSION 29.6.17 P-5359 C.P.K. TAYLOR ©Commonwealth of Australia

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EXHIBIT #643 PRÉCIS OF EVIDENCE OF MR TAYLOR

MR McAVOY: Thank you. Mr Taylor, I want to first start with the review that you were asked to undertake by the UK Ministry of Justice. You led that review, which commenced on 11 September 2015; that’s correct?---That’s right, yes.

And, as a result of that review, a report was prepared and presented to Parliament, which is dated December 2016?---That’s right.

Could Mr Taylor be shown tab 24 in the alternative tender bundle. You recognise that document?---Certainly, yes.

Yes. Thank you. Now, the terms of reference for that review were to – required you to examine the nature and characteristics of youth offending, the effectiveness of the youth justice system in responding to that offending, and the effectiveness of the current leadership governance and delivery structures in the youth justice system; that’s correct?---That’s right.

Can you just tell the Commissioners what prompted the review?---Yes. The new secretary of state, Michael Gove, came in after the general election of 2015 and wanted to have a look at the various parts of government – government policy. One of those was education in custody across the board, because – partly because the outcomes for adult prisoners was very poor but also particularly because reoffending rates for children in – who were coming out detention was very poor. And I think also that we had seen big reductions in terms of the youth prison population in the UK, but there was a question about where we should go next.

And just in terms of those reductions, if I recite some of the figures to you, to confirm that that’s your understanding, in the period between 2007 and 2015 there was a by 79 per cent number of children cautioned or convicted; correct?---Correct.

And over the same period the number of children entering the youth justice system fell by 82 per cent, and the number of children prosecuted was reduced by 69 per cent?---Yes.

And so that at the point at which your report as finalised, there were only 900 children in custody in England and Wales, which was down from approximately 2900 in 2007?---That’s right, yes.

So that represents a very significant decrease in the – both the engagement with the youth justice system and the raw numbers in terms of young people in custody, doesn’t it?---It does, indeed.

And - - -


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COMMISSIONER WHITE: Well, can I just ask at this point, this is before your intervention, if I could call it that or the intervention of the government. To what were you able to attribute that drop? We have heard that, in fact internationally in the western world, there has been significant drops in the number of young people both entering detention and also in conviction rates. Is there any factors that we would be interested to hear about?---Yes. If I briefly just take you back, I think a lot of youth justice policy in the UK came from the – what was known as the Bulger case, which was the shocking murder by two 11 year olds, of a three year old boy, Jamie Bulger. And at the time there was a big sort of – a lot of scare stories in the papers about this is the beginning of something terrible. There was a lot of talk about feral youth, I remember. And politically at the time, we had a conservative government that was on the way out, and a new Labour Party that was on the way in, with Tony Blair, who I think was very keen to prove that Labour governments were weak when it came to crime, which I think had been a perception in the past, and certainly a perception with the public. So he came in with a strong view of tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, replacing a home secretary Michael Howard who said famously and loudly – a conservative home secretary, “Prison works.” So I think that was the starting point in 1997. What Labour’s aim then was to begin – what they wanted to do was to nip this offending in the bud. We had these children aged 10, 12, 13, who were running around committing various sorts of offences, being very out of control, and the idea was if we could go in hard with these younger children, lock them up if we had to, make sure that cases were brought to court, then that would in some way reduce the level of offending and antisocial behaviour later on. So that was the first sort of policy driver. Secondly, the police were – during that period, were told, were given very specific targets in terms of solving crimes. So police were told that, “You need to solve this amount of crimes. You need to solve this amount of crimes per month.” And that drove some very different sorts of behaviour from the police over that period, where they arrested and were charging far more children than they would have done in the past. And I give an example in the report, and I will give it briefly now, which was a police officer I – a former police officer told me he came across a child who had done a fake sponsored swim so he got – he had got sponsorship for a hundred people for a pound for a sponsored swim that never happened, and he then pocketed the money. The police were called, and that case then counted as 100 cases solved and brought to justice. So you could imagine back at the police station, that evening it was sort of high fives all around, they hit their target. And the police didn’t like this target different culture at all. Towards the end of the new Labour administration there was a sense that actually a force – driving police in this sort of target driven way wasn’t proving particularly effective. Partly because, if you want to get your targets up, you nick children because children are easy to arrest, they are very bad at crime and they tend to commit it very publicly. So that’s how we got to incarceration rates being so high. And then various factors have reduced over time. The first thing, I think, is simply a drop in crime generally across the western world where every country – and I was just looking at Australia today and the trend in Australia is no different from other countries in the western world where we have seen a significant drop off from 1994 onwards of violent crime and a commensurate way with youth crime as well. There was also greater focus on – and a government focus on reducing the amount of


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children who were in custody. So it began to feel like we were locking up lots and lots of children and actually we weren’t making – the outcomes for these children were not good. So there were three real drivers: a change in police behaviour, a change in government policy, and also a greater focus on community justice. But I think – and particularly I think with the youth justice board and youth offending teams pushing very hard ..... children dealt with, where possible, in the community – with clear evidence that actually, where children are dealt with in the community, they tend to be less likely to reoffend than if they’re incarcerated.

MR McAVOY: Thank you. And in terms of the demographic of that core of children that was left at the time you undertook your report, are you able to explain to the Commissioners what type – or characteristics of children were left within the system?---Yes. And that I think has been what’s interesting. I think the children who were left in the system were always there, but partly because of the nature of the crimes that children now no longer commit. So, for example, vehicle crime is very rare. It’s very hard to steal a car these days, the security systems are much better, so the sorts of children being funnelled into the youth justice through those sorts of offences have generally disappeared from custody and what we are tending to see is children from very complex home backgrounds where there’s family break down, poverty, substance misuse, sexual abuse, children very often in the care system, and often with mental health – diagnosed or undiagnosed difficulties, and also a strong preponderance of children with learning difficulties or with some sort of additional educational needs such as Asperger’s or autism.

And children from particular ethnic backgrounds?---Yes. And I suppose if we were to – we would be wrong to overtrump our statistics here, because actually if you look at what’s happened to ..... youth custody, it has dropped significantly, but if you look at what’s happened to the amount of children from black and ethnic minority communities actually the graph has gone – has reduced, but in a much more flat way. I don’t know if you can see ..... so that certainly has been a disappointment, so actually there’s a greater proposition of children from black and ethnic minorities now locked up than there were at the height.

And there is still some presence of working class poor or impoverished white children?---Yes. I mean the majority – the majority of children, I guess unsurprisingly are white kids, probably about 75 per cent are white working class kids, and about 20 per cent are from black minority backgrounds.

In your review, you identified some things that didn’t work, one of which you’ve commented on is a Scared Straight program, can I just elaborate on that a little bit?---Yes, it’s one of these programs that – it feels right. It feels sensible. Prison is an unpleasant place. If you expose children to the unpleasantness of prison, surely then they will realise that this is a dreadful place to be, and they will therefore mend their ways and not – and stop offending. What is interesting about something like Scared Straight is actually what it seems to do is demystify prison. So children who were involved in Scared Straight programs, both here and the United States became more likely to end up in custody than children who hadn’t been involved in the


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program. So there was something – there was something about the demystification of it. I think there was also something about funnelling children towards this. “This is where you are heading, this is your direction of travel.” And therefore confirming that children that, “You’re a bad kid and this is where you’re going.”

And then in terms of the findings of your review and the recommendations, one of the key recommendations is that the government pursue a model of secure schools as an alternative to the present modes of custody?---Yes.

Can you just complain explain for the Commissioners what these secure schools model involves?---Yes. I mean my own background was an education background, and I ran a special school for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, and one of the things that struck me when I visited our secure estate was the similarities between the children who were ending in custody and the children who were in my schools. So that list I gave you of the characteristics of children in the Youth custody system were very similar to the children who were in schools like mine. What we have in England and Wales are lots of examples of outstanding practice where we have schools for children with behaviour problems, which are enormously successful which get very good results, which take on and address some of the most challenging sorts of behaviours and help to support children into a transition towards adulthood. So we had a really good model there of what was working. I compared that to what happened within the secure estates, where the focus was much more about coercion, about control, about stopping bad things from happening rather than the focus that I would have wanted, which would have been on giving the children what they need in order that when they leave they can go on to become successful adults and create fewer victims of crime. So specifically I want the secure schools focus to be on education. But, just to be clear, when I say education I don’t just mean children sitting doing exams or learning to read or whatever it might be, though those things I believe are absolutely critical as a way of getting children out of the cycle of crime. But also a bespoke education that fits with the needs of the child. So in effect you have a child that comes in with a range of difficulties and the job of a secure school would be to put in place programs to support that would mean that child can go on when they leave – when he or she leaves to be successful and much less likely to offend. But I think also, critically, with a head teacher who has responsibility for everything that goes on within the establishment, at the moment we have the situation in our prisons where education is delivered by one separate commissioned service. Health is delivered by one separate commissioned service and security and behaviour is delivered by the Governor, so the Governor has lots of things going on under his roof, but only a few of these things are his responsibility, and what I would be saying would be that everything that goes on in a secure school would be the responsibility of the head teacher. Because what’s critical in turning around, and changing the behaviour of very entrenched behaviour of some of these children is to have a clear culture and ethos that runs through everything that happens within the establishment. So everybody who is there needs to understand why they are there, and what they’re trying to do, and they also need to understand that other people – that their colleagues that they are working with, whatever discipline they are coming from, also share that culture, that belief, and that ethos, because that to me is the


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critical thing that you see within the very best schools who deal with these sorts of children on the outside, the critical thing that we need to bring inside.

Given that you’ve expressed the view that the educational program for each of the children really needs to be bespoke, is there some – does it follow from that that the schools need to be relatively small in size and, if so, what is an ideal size?---Yes. We – we sort of thought long and hard about this and there’s something about economies of scale here as well. I mean, I – my feeling is between 60 and 80 is probably a reasonable number, and that mirrors the numbers within a school on the outside. So a pupil referral unit or a special school.

And do you start with a youth offending centre and repurpose that, or do you start fresh with a school and adapt that? How do you – how do you go about designing and building these secure schools?---Well, I think the critical thing here is these children have been sentenced by a court, and therefore the public has an absolute right to know that they are protected, and that the children are unable to escape. So security – it’s essential that the children are there and that they’re sentenced and they are kept safe there. We have some facilities in this country that we could convert into a secure school, but also we are also considering the possibilities of building secure schools from scratch. But certainly the way I see this is going from a system where we have custody with a bit of education to somewhere that has education with custody wrapped around it. So the focus is – there’s a big change in emphasis about the criteria for these establishments.

And how far progressed are you in terms of rolling out the secure schools program?---This is early days so we are currently working closely with the policy team in the Ministry of Justice to work out the parameters of the first two, but we are hopeful in the next couple of years that we will get the first two opened.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Will you be looking to the private sector to operate them or will these be government run, or haven’t you made a decision yet, Mr Taylor?---Well, that’s interesting because in the review actually I recommended that these were kept up through the Department of Education free school program, which is a – of which providers need to be not for profit. But that’s the sort of ongoing discussion that’s happening at the moment. So we haven’t come to an established decision on that yet.

MR McAVOY: Thank you. I just want to turn quickly now to the recommendation with respect to children’s panels?---Yes.

Can you just explain the concept of children’s panels and how they might assist in managing children within the criminal justice system?---Yes. We have seen some good examples of problem solving courts around the world, from America – and actually in the UK we have a Family Drug and Alcohol Court where parents have an opportunity to return to court on a regular basis to prove to the judge that they have stopped substance misuse and, therefore are able to look after their child again, and the key characteristics of these courts is that it’s the same judge who is following up


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on an individual case. Critically, as a judge who understand the case very well and begins to develop a relationship with the offender who is in front of them. And particularly what struck me, I think, in courts in England and Wales – I mean, magistrates courts have got a long way to make them more child friendly, but what magistrates kept saying to me is, “We get fairly limited information about the children, and we make a sentencing decision based on that information, but after that it’s a cliff edge. We don’t know whether we have imposed the right sentence or not. We don’t know – unless that child, sadly, comes up before us again, we don’t know whether we’ve – whether the sentence has been effective or not.” And I contrasted that with what happens in – sorry, what happens in Scotland, where there’s a panel system where lay – a lay panel meets with the child’s family, and also anybody else who is relevant within that child’s life, and decisions are made through that process. So it’s a much more iterative process about what is an appropriate sentence for a child. It goes over a longer period, and it’s followed up over a period of time. So rather than this cliff edge in sentencing that we currently had, what I wanted to have was a dynamic sentencing panel where a child would be brought – and it wouldn’t necessarily need to be in a courtroom, though it would need to have – you know, have elements of formality, where a child would be held to account, where a plan would be then established for what was going to happen next. And I think critically that it wasn’t just what the child wanted to do, the child needed to be held to account, but also I think the system around that child as well. So the parents, who I think are often missed in the court system and aren’t held to account, the parents would be obliged to agree to the terms of the recommendation plan. Also the local authority as well, so that if the family required interventions or if the – or if there was mental health interventions that were required, that that was part of the package as well. Because what you see with these particularly complex children left within the system is the solution to their offending is not simply a justice solution. It isn’t just about giving them a punishment which will then make them mend their ways. There needs to be a justice component to it, partly because the public need to be assured that something is being done, but by and large the solution to the children’s behaviour is about getting them into education, getting them into safe housing, making sure that they are mentally healthy and giving the family the support that they require in order to look after their child in an appropriate manner.

And you see the children panels – children’s panels as having a role in relation to the transition out of custody and into resettlement as well?---Yes, that’s right. I went to Spain and I looked at, I believe you spoke to David McGuire yesterday and I went to look at one of the Diagrama prisons in Spain, and what struck me was there was a judge in the prison following up on the individual cases and that was very useful for two reasons. I think first of all, from a safeguarding point of view, the more authoritative outsiders who come into custodial establishments, the better. The more we can let light and oxygen in the better. That gives the opportunity for children to make direct complaints to the judge about any mistreatment they might have had, but also critically, the judge who sentenced them is the judge who will then follow up on that case. So they will sit there in discussion with the prison saying, you know, “How are things going? What do we need to do next?” And that general judge will then sign off whether, for example, that child is able to be released temporarily, for


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example, for day leave to go to school or to go out to work. So the judge is quite heavily involved in that planning process, and I would see through a children’s panel that the children’s panel would follow up on the plan, whether the plan included a custodial component or whether the plan included a community component, but the panel would convene and follow up on that case to make sure that not only the child, but also the other people who agreed to fulfil the plan, were doing their bit as well.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: And, Mr Taylor has there been buy in by the judicial arm into this proposal?---It’s interesting. When I went to Scotland, I talked to judges in Scotland about this, and what they said is, “None of us up here would ever want to go back to the system how it was before.” I think we certainly have had lots of enthusiasm from some judges and also from some magistrates as well, who again have been very – lay magistrates who are very keen to follow up on cases. I think what this requires is legislation and I think, partly because of Brexit, we have quite a clogged up legislative agenda at the moment. So as well as looking at the way panels could be developed through legislation, we are also looking at what we can do with the current system that we have to adapt our system in order that we make it more like the panel system that I envisaged within the review.

MR McAVOY: Thank you. I just want to turn now to your findings in relation to minimal custodial sentences?---Yes.

And the recommendation that, in respect of youth, there be a minimum sentence of six months. Can you just explain the thinking behind that recommendation?---Yes. I mean, this came, I suppose, from various sources. First of all, if you had said to me when I was at my school that you were going to give me a child for two months and I was going to do something with them – you know, move them on, make them more successful, educate them, I would look at you aghast. And I think we have this strange expectation of our custodial establishments that we send children in for very short periods of time, two, three months, and we expect something to change. And there’s nobody you talk to within the custodial estate who thinks that short sentences serve any purpose. When the child is – when the child sentenced, if the child happens to have been making good progress, say, between the committal of the offence and the final trial, then anything good that might be going on in that child’s life is then immediately taken away. So, for example, if a child in care had moved into a care home, was settling down really well, was turning up at school, and was then taken out and sentenced for – sentenced to custody for say four months, the child would then lose that place in the care home, they would lose that place in school, and when they came out again they would be back to square 1. So if good things were happening in the child’s life, the sentence would simply pull the rug from under the child. If the child was continuing on this spiral of offending behaviour, which many of them are, actually all it would seem to do was to pause it for a bit, but then ultimately to compound it because any good that’s likely to be done by giving a child a strong program of support in terms of behaviour management, in terms of education, in terms of support with rehabilitation, is just simply not doable within two, three, four months.


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Thank you. And does the requirement of sentencing with a minimum sentence of six months in mind have a knock-on next in terms of how the judiciary then thinks about the need for some other alternative?---Yes, that’s right. I mean, I think one can’t do this without making sure that the community arrangements are suitable and appropriate, and also that they’re tough enough. I mean, the public, if you’re reducing short sentences, even though I don’t think that ..... resistance from the public, particularly when it comes to children, in making that argument nevertheless the public need to be assured actually that something is being done with these children, particularly victims of crime, it’s absolutely critical. So if one was to do this one simply can’t do it and ignore the community sentences. They must be seen to be just and fair and following things up. I think the argument needs to be made strongly about the lack of effectiveness of short sentences, and the way that actually children on short sentences can be the most disruptive children within custodial establishments. And there’s something – I think where magistrates simply say – look, you know, throw up their hands, “We just don’t know what to do next.” You know, “We’re just don’t know where to go, so just – you know, take him away for four months, and, you know, let’s hope something will get better.” But the reality is something doesn’t get better, and usually it gets worse, because the evidence says the custodial – the community sentences tends to have better outcomes than custodial sentences.

Yes. Thank you?---And continuing to have sentences for children who commit serious and violent offences, children who remain a danger to their communities, yeah, is essential.

Yes. Bearing in mind the need to provide some alternatives, have you spent some time in your review setting out what needs to be done in terms of diversionary schemes?---Yes.

And one matter in particular which you address is the need for a design of a diversionary scheme particularly for black, Asian and minority ethnic children, recognising they have needs which might be somewhat different?---Yes, I think the answer is yes and no. I think there needs to be a balance here, because I think that all children need certain things. All children need to be contained, looked after, kept safe, have somewhere safe to live, have good health, be in education, those sorts of things. So I wouldn’t want a – you know, I wouldn’t want a diversion scheme to move away from any of those aspects, but I think that what we need to make sure is that if we’re able to reduce the amount of black and ethnic minority children who are going into custody, and that rate continues to be too high. We need to make sure the support offered for those children is effective in helping them reduce reoffending, but often the support is – is support to the system around the child, not just to that child themselves. And supported – and conditions, I suppose I would put it.

And proper evaluative mechanisms are critical to ensuring the effectiveness of those programs?---Yes. And one of the things the Youth Justice Board has is a duty to research – to research into what works within the youth justice world, and I’m very keen to follow up on that to make sure that – to make sure we are very clear about


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what the evidence says when it comes to the success of – or lack of success of different interventions. You know, good and effective community interventions as opposed to Scared Straight, for example.

And you observe that there’s an important role for other sectors in the community, health and educational services sectors in providing appropriate diversionary programs. That would seem to be a fairly common sense observation. Is there anything you can add to that?---I mean, really what it comes down to, it’s three things. If children are healthy, that means physically and mentally healthy, if they are somewhere safe and secure to live, and if they are busy during the day, then the chances of them getting involved in crime – busy in an appropriate way during the day, then those three factors are critical to reducing offending. If you get those three things right, and that’s not – often not easy to do but if you get those three things right, then you have – then you will find that reoffending drops significantly and crime rates.

Thank you. You’ve also made some recommendations in relation to the initial contact with the youth justice system. One of the - - -?---Yes.

One of the features that I would like you just to maybe comment on is the – what you’ve described as a need for improved speed of cases coming to court, and the opportunity cost of waiting weeks in limbo while – during a critical time for the intervention in the child’s life. Can you just expand on that a little bit?---Yes. I mean, I think the saying is justice delayed is justice denied and we see the time it takes – the time it takes for some cases to come to court is enormous and I think for children with, often a serious court case hanging over them, it’s very hard for those children to settle into anything in a meaningful way and therefore, sadly, children who are waiting on remand, in order to be tried, often end up getting into other stuff as well. And my feeling, very much with the recommendations of the panel system, was actually that being able to take on the cases quickly as possible in a less formal, but nevertheless formal, way and being able to take into account any other cases that might have happened in the meantime, and delivering justice in a much more speedy way, rather than having children going around with this – with the threat of whatever may happen as a result of custody hanging over them at all times. But on the other hand, yeah, one has to get the evidence right, one has to – particularly if it goes to trial, one has to get the evidence right, and police will of ten be gathering intelligence, and it may be that the child is wrapped up in a crime that includes adults as well. So sometimes one can understand the reasons why things take a long time, but sometimes the cumulative effect of that is actually not in the interests of a child, and therefore not in the interests actually of the public, because it puts the public at greater risk of the child reoffending and creating more victims.

So the system in England and Wales has, prior to your review, provided for youth offending teams which are able to engage with the young person at a local level and they’re - - -?---Yes.


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They’re operated lie the local authority, and they would be the teams that would be engaged in the diversionary aspects and having speedy initial contact with the child; is that correct?---Yes. I mean, youth offending teams were established in 1998 and they have done a huge amount in supporting communities – so they have two, I suppose, main statutory functions. They’re made up of people from health, from education, from social care backgrounds, and from probation. Their aim is to fulfil the terms of a sentence when it’s a community sentence. So if the court imposes a community sentence, it’s a youth offending team who makes sure the terms of that sentence are fulfilled and discharged. They also have a role in supporting the court role, so providing pre-sentence reports for magistrates, for providing information within courts as well. So they are there with a high level of expertise and also I think people who have the resilience and determination to keep going, and to keep working with children for whom the rest of the system has often given up on, you know, children who can be enormously challenging and difficult and hard to engage, youth justice, youth offending teams have done a terrific job in terms of working with those children, and I think have been instrumental in some of the reasons why we are seeing falling custody rates and falling reoffending rates and first ..... into crime in England and Wales.

And so, because of the localised nature, perhaps, those youth offending teams have adapted their methods of work and their approaches?---Yes.

And you’ve acknowledged that in your report and suggested there be a further devolution of power to those teams - - -?---Yes, indeed.

- - - to facilitate that innovation?---Well ..... my recommendation for devolution of power to local authorities, what I was very keen on – and I think there’s always a balance here between the role of the centre and the role of – and the role of local authorities. In the centre, we need to have assurance – and Ministers need to have assurance and judges need to have assurance that the terms of the sentence will be fulfilled under the terms of the court, and we also need to understand that youth offending is being dealt with in a similar way across the country. On the other hand, we don’t want to be so constraining in what we ordain from the centre that actually we get in the way of innovative and new ways of working with children who are offending. And I think at times there’s a risk that the centre can do that. The centre plants its itself in the way of innovation, and I think that has been something the centre has been guilty of in the past. And therefore what I was very keen – was that the Youth Justice Board and the Ministry of justice were really clear that, yes, you have to fulfil the statutory obligations, but the way in which you fulfil those statutory obligations is up to you. I suppose it’s moving from – back from the new Labour, Tony Blair days where there was quite a – sort of a command and control idea, which was, “We want you to do – we want you to do X, and this is how we want you to do X.” And I think we have moved on a bit from there, partly I think because the system has changed so much, where for example police and social workers work together in England in a way that was unthinkable in 1998 when youth justice teams were developed. But I want to move now more to a system which says, “Here are your statutory responsibilities, but the way in which you fulfil those responsibilities,


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and the structure which you set up around them, we give people greater flexibility in the way they do them. So we hold you to account for your outcomes, not for the way in which you do things.”

COMMISSIONER WHITE: If you are going to do that, Mr Taylor, you need some level of oversight to see it’s measuring up to the standards that you would want?---Absolutely right, and I think there’s always a tension here between us making sure that quality assurance is in place, but also that the correct information is coming back to the centre and indeed to Ministers, so that they can go on to make further decisions in the future. I think also assurance critically for the public as well. People who have been victims of crime, people who are worried about crime, they also need to get assurance from the centre that something is being done, that children are being dealt with in an appropriate way that creates fewer victims. Excuse me. Sorry about this.

MR McAVOY: That’s okay?---Sorry.

I’ve only got a few short questions left for you, Mr Taylor. In response to your report, there was also a government response to Charlie Taylor’s review of the youth justice system presented to Parliament in 2016 as well?---Yes.

Can we see that. And you recognise that document?---Yes. That’s right, yes.

And in the government’s response, well, the outcome of the government’s response is that – well, you’ve ended up as the chairperson of the Youth Justice Board?---Indeed.

And there has been a commitment to looking at the secure schools program, and developing pilots. Can you just explain to the Commissioners what other aspects of your review the government has decided to proceed on?---At this stage the government is continuing – I think if you look at the – much of the response of what it says is, “This is very interesting, we like this idea and we will defer the work on where we take it next.” So there’s work continuing on looking at the way in which youth ..... operate. There’s work continuing on the way in which we can make our court system more effective. I think at the moment the recommendations on sentencing, I think we haven’t yet got the progress that I would have wanted yet. But again we have a new government in place. So I suppose to some extent that government ..... from the last government, we have a different government now. So to some extent it may be that the government wants to do more with the review or it may indeed ..... the new government, the new secretary of state will want to do less.

So it’s a case of continue to watch this space?---Correct.

Thank you. They’re my questions for Mr Taylor, Commissioners.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: I have a couple - - -


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MR McAVOY: Yes, Commissioners.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: - - - Mr McAvoy.

Mr Taylor, has the notion of specialised training for youth justice judges and lay magistrates been entertained, so that matters must - - -?---Yes .....

- - - come before those people who have fulfilled that training component?---Yes. And the Magistrates Association – the Magistrates Association have done a lot here to make courts more child friendly. My feeling is actually we could go further, and that’s why I wanted to introduce the panel system. At the moment, still a lot of cases end up in the Crown Court, serious offences will end up in the Crown Court, which will be heard in front of a jury with potentially the child sitting within a glass dock at the back of the courtroom, you know, in a sit high profile court like the Old Bailey. There has been a big push from the judiciary to push more cases down to the Youth Court, which is a more appropriate place to hear them. But my feeling with panels is that we could go further still, that we can move to a more informal process which feels a bit less intimidating, which is more about problem solving for that child whilst nevertheless, you know, not for a minute failing to take into account that the child may have committed a serious offence, but doing it in a way that is going to make the child less likely to commit an offence in the future.

And - - -?---So we have made progress, I would say, but I think we have further to go.

And would that thinking include perhaps accreditation for the legal profession to work in this field? That they may need some training in what we have come to hear is the trauma-informed practice and approach to child offending and managing them. So the – both the prosecution and defence?---Yes. And the Bar Association, who oversees barristers and also the Solicitors Regulation Authority, who oversee solicitors, are both working in this space, actually, to – not necessarily to come up with some common shared themes, but working on how they can improve the training of people when they come to work with children in the Youth Court. And the difficulty we have, sadly, is that actually the most vulnerable people who end up in court in England and Wales, i.e. children, are often served by the least experienced legal representation, the least experienced and indeed the least well paid legal representation. And one of the things in the report I talked about was the mismatch, not least in pay, in terms of what happens for a child who commits – or is accused of an offence and an adult who is accused of the same offence, where actually the lawyer who was dealing with that child would be better paid when it came to the adult than the child, which doesn’t – which is not right.

COMMISSIONER GOODA: Just one question, Mr Taylor. How is the public mood in the United Kingdom about moving from that tough on crime era now, you know, the big reduction Mr McAvoy talked about on children in detention? So what’s the mood in your part of the world about that move?---It’s very interesting. In the general election in ’92 and general election in ’97, crime and not least youth


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crime were issues that were discussed, by governments or governments in waiting, political parties were developing all sorts of policies. In the last general election that we just had, and also in the general election in 2015, crime is a far lower priority for the general public than it has been in the past. People are nevertheless still worried about crime, but the general concern about crime that the people had, and therefore the political response to it – the temperature has simply been turned down considerably not least I think just because the crime rate has fallen so significantly, you know, since the high point in the early ’90s. So in the last election, I can’t remember, apart from conversations about the awful terrorist incidents that we had during the election campaign, I can’t remember crime being an issue that came to the fore in the way that it would have been in the major top two or three issues – you know, 20 – 15, 20 years ago.

So in your – I’m gathering from your view the leadership plays a big role in how we treat children more generally, but particularly in the justice system?---Without doubt. And I think, you know, to blow my own organisation’s trumpet, even though I’ve only been involved for a short period of time, the focus on treating children as children first and offenders second, always taking into account the welfare of the children I think is something now that is far better understood not only within the justice system, within the sort of courts, and – but also critically I think with the police, where the police, when they deal with offences – not least I think because we had some terrible cases where girls in various cities in the UK were being groomed, girls who run away from care homes were being groomed by gangs, and all sorts of dreadful things were happening, there’s much more a focus on children and adolescents as people who need help and support rather than simple, “These are people who need to be locked up and dealt with.” So there has been a change of tone. But, you know, this is always a – this is always a fragile – there’s always a fragile truce here and I think we have actually seen in the last two or three months we have seen a slightly uptake of children in custody. At the – it has gone up a little bit over the last month now – over the last two or three months now. Is that the beginning of a trend or is that something where the numbers are so low that you just see these – you know, the ebb and flow of decisions? And I think also there is – there is a lot of concern particularly in our cities about knife crime, and about youths involved in knife crime. Actually, if you look at the murder rate of youths it continues to be very low but nevertheless we have seen a slight increase in knife crime, and more children carrying knives, and that’s creating some nervousness and anxiety, particularly in the big cities.

Thank you.

MR McAVOY: Thank you. Before I sit down, Commissioners, I should tender Mr Taylor’s report. It’s titled Review of the Youth Justice System in England and Wales and it appears as alternative bundle – tender bundle, tab 24.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: I’m not sure. Has that actually been – index to that has been tender so it has its own exhibit, doesn’t it. Exhibit 644.


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EXHIBIT #644 REVIEW OF THE YOUTH JUSTICE SYSTEM IN ENGLAND AND WALES

MR McAVOY: And I will also tender the Government Response to Charlie Taylor’s Review of the Youth Justice System, December 2016 and the LOI number, that I just had I’m sorry, is RCN.0014.0001.0003.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Exhibit 645. Thank you.

EXHIBIT #645 CHARLIE TAYLOR’S REVIEW OF THE YOUTH JUSTICE SYSTEM, DECEMBER 2016

MR McAVOY: Thank you, Commissioner.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: ..... thank you very much, indeed, Mr Taylor, for assisting us?---Can I just make – can I just make one more point, very briefly, if that’s alright.

It certainly is?---Which is simply this: that if you wanted to sum up, to some extent the findings of my report, I looked at two things, critically. One was an advertisement for prison officers within the youth estate in which the language was all about containment, restraint, control. And then if you looked at a similar advert from a school like mine for a teaching assistant on the same amount of money, around 20 – between 20 and £25,000 and the language in that advert would be about care and support and change and I think if you could shift the attitudes from advert A to advert B, then we could all make enormous progress in the way that we deal with children who commit crimes.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: Thank you for that neat summary. It probably does gather up together a lot of the evidence we have heard from people who have been in the forefront of reform in this area. We do thank you very much and again our apologies for messing you around with time and we will - - -?---No problem.

- - - read all of the material associated with your précis with much interest. Thank you, Mr Taylor?---Thank you very much. Thank you.


MR McAVOY: Commissioners, that concludes the evidence proposed to be called today. We shall recommence in the morning with Ms Stone, who will be appearing by audio-visual link from Ontario, Canada, if that is suitable.


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COMMISSIONER WHITE: Hope it works. 9 o’clock?

MR McAVOY: Yes, Commissioners. That’s my understanding of the time and that’s what appears on my timetable that I have in my hand.

COMMISSIONER WHITE: We hope it’s successful. Thanks Mr McAvoy, we will adjourn then until 9 clock tomorrow.

MATTER ADJOURNED at 6.10 pm UNTIL FRIDAY, 29 JUNE 2017


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Index of Witness Events

KELLY DEDEL, CALLED P-5282THE WITNESS WITHDREW P-5294

ELIZABETH GRANT, AFFIRMED P-5294ROHAN LULHAM, AFFIRMED P-5295THE WITNESSES WITHDREW P-5306

DENIS REYNOLDS, SWORN P-5307EXAMINATION-IN-CHIEF BY MR CALLAGHAN P-5307

THE WITNESS WITHDREW P-5313

SEAN HARVEY, SWORN P-5313EXAMINATION-IN-CHIEF BY MR CALLAGHAN P-5314


JON JUREIDINI, CALLED P-5336THE WITNESS WITHDREW P-5344

DENISE RIORDAN, SWORN P-5344EXAMINATION-IN-CHIEF BY MR CALLAGHAN P-5344CROSS-EXAMINATION BY DR DWYER P-5351CROSS-EXAMINATION BY MS GRAHAM P-5355


CHARLES PEREGRINE KERWIN TAYLOR, CALLED P-5359THE WITNESS WITHDREW P-5373

Index of Exhibits and MFIs

EXHIBIT #632 PRÉCIS OF EVIDENCE OF KELLY DEDEL DATED 15/05/2017

P-5282

EXHIBIT #633 PRÉCIS OF EVIDENCE AND ANNEXURES OF DR LULHAM DATED 22/05/2017

P-5295

EXHIBIT #634 PRÉCIS OF EVIDENCE AND ANNEXURES OF DR GRANT DATED 17/06/2017

P-5296

EXHIBIT #635 NEW DARWIN YOUTH DETENTION CENTRE OUTLINE DESIGN BRIEF

P-5302

EXHIBIT #636 PRÉCIS OF EVIDENCE OF DR GRANT DATED 22/06/2017

P-5303


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EXHIBIT #637 POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS PROVIDED BY DR GRANT

P-5307

EXHIBIT #638 PRESENTATION PAPER DELIVERED BY JUDGE REYNOLDS

P-5311

EXHIBIT #639 STATEMENT OF SEAN HARVEY DATED 27/06/2017

P-5314

EXHIBIT #640 CONFIDENTIAL EXCHANGE OF CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN SOLICITOR FOR THE NORTHERN TERRITORY AND SOLICITOR ASSISTING THE ROYAL COMMISSION COMPRISING THREE LETTERS

P-5332

EXHIBIT #651 CONFIDENTIAL REPORT OF DR JUREIDINI P-5337

EXHIBIT #642 STATEMENT OF DENISE RIORDAN DATED 22/06/2017

P-5345

EXHIBIT #643 PRÉCIS OF EVIDENCE OF MR TAYLOR P-5360

EXHIBIT #644 REVIEW OF THE YOUTH JUSTICE SYSTEM IN ENGLAND AND WALES

P-5373

EXHIBIT #645 CHARLIE TAYLOR’S REVIEW OF THE YOUTH JUSTICE SYSTEM, DECEMBER 2016

P-5373


Documents

TranscriptCreator - NT Royal Comm Web view.ROYAL COMMISSION 29.6.17P-5331 ©Commonwealth of Australia.ROYAL COMMISSION 29.6.17P-5283K. DEDEL ©Commonwealth of Australia.ROYAL COMMISSION