At Don Dale juvenile detention centre a 15-year-old orphaned Aboriginal boy took his life only days after being locked up for $90 worth of ‘crimes’. How many Australians know about Johnny Warramarrba? Johnny’s mother died when he was a baby. His dad was killed in a car accident when he was eleven. When he committed his less than $90 worth of ‘crimes’ – the stealing of pens and stationary – his grandmother was seriously ill in Darwin Hospital.
This young boy is one of many lives lost in and out of juvenile detention. In general our youth come out of juvenile detention in a worse state than they went in. Hopelessness is all their mind’s eye sees. That which the eye sees and the ear hears is despair and the fears that go with.
For
every young life lost, thousands of others meander in broken lives and
for many from broken lives to ruination. Johnny Warramarrba was found
hanging in his cell. This was February 9, 2000. He had been arrested in
his community for stealing goods worth less than $90. There was no
counselling and he was not guided by any mentoring. Instead he was
journeyed 800 kilometres to Darwin and jailed.
Five
days before his pending release Johnny killed himself. Because he
refused to wash up, a prison officer ordered him to his cell. He was
found a little while later, hanging. He died nine hours later at Darwin
Hospital.
The
penal estate, in line with the criminal justice system, is a culture of
punishment and therefore everyone who works within this culture soaks
up and dishes out punishment.
In
2009, an Aboriginal boy aged 12 was arrested and jailed for being in
possession of a piece of chocolate – a Freddo frog. He was charged for
shoplifting from a Coles supermarket. He was locked up for stealing an
item that would have sold for 70 cents.
The kid had no prior convictions. Should we be prosecuting children for these types of ‘crimes’?
Western
Australia is the mother of jailers of the nation’s Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander peoples. One in six of the state’s Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islanders have been to prison – this is an abomination
and not only smacks of but is racialised imprisonment. It is also the
world’s highest jailing rate. In fact, one in 13 of the state’s
Aboriginal adult males is in jail.
Australia
has the world’s highest rate of juvenile detention with the mother of
all jailers, the United States of America, ranked second behind
Australia. The juvenile detention rate gets worse, higher the more west
we travel across the Australian continent, with the Northern Territory
and Western Australia highest.
These
children are screaming out for help and instead of listening to them we
brutalise them; maltreating, abusing, degrading, diminishing, bashing,
isolating them. What is with the 23 hour lockdowns? What is with the
long-term separations from other detainees, from human contact?
In viewing the footage packaged in the Four Corners episode,
“Australia’s Shame” what stood out for me was the boy who after being
stripped naked by guards huddled with his head into his knees. The hurt
is deep, damaging. It goes to the psychosocial, destroying prospects of a
positive self, robbing one of all hope.
There
is nothing as profoundly powerful as forgiveness. The forgiveness of
others validates self-worth, builds bridges and positive futures. What
is missing from the criminal justice system and the penal estate are the
cultures of forgiveness and redemption. Forgiveness cultivated and
understood keeps families and society solid as opposed to the corrosive
anger that diminishes people into the darkest places, into effectively
being mental unwell. Anger is a warning sign to becoming unwell. Love
comes more natural to the human heart despite that hate can take one
over. In the battle between love and hate, one will choose love more
easily when in understanding of the endless dark place that is hate and
of its corrosive impacts.
Hate
can never achieve what love ever so easily can. Hate and anger have
filled our prison and juvenile detention centres with the mentally
unwell, with the most vulnerable, with the poor – and not with the
criminally minded.
Like
so many others, I have worked to turn around the lives of as many
people in jail as I possibly could, but for every inmate or former
inmate that people like me dedicate time to in order to improve their
lot – ultimately there is tsunami of poverty related issues and
draconian laws that flood ‘offenders’ into prisons. Jailing the poorest,
most vulnerable, the mentally unwell, in my experience, only serves to
elevate the risk of reoffending, of normalising disordered and broken
lives of digging deeper divides between people, of marginalising people.
It has been my experience that in general people come out of prison
worse than when they went in.
Of course violence breeds violence, hate breeds hate but yet we jail and punish like there is no tomorrow.
One
of society’s major failures is the punitive criminal justice system.
Despite an evidently failed penal estate we continue on with it. For too
many it has become easier to lie and act as if the failure is a success
or as if there are not alternatives. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in the
Brothers Karamazov, wrote, “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man
who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he
cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all
respect for himself and for others. And having no respect ceases to
love.”
Johnny
Warramarrba’s mother died when he was a baby. His dad was killed in a
car accident when he was eleven. When he committed his less than $90
worth of ‘crimes’ – the stealing of pens and stationary – his
grandmother was seriously ill in Darwin Hospital. The boy came from
Groote Eylandt. I recently spent time at Groote Eylandt, and in its
three communities. It is a closed island where permission is required to
visit. The impoverishment of the people is stark despite the high
cultural content. Only three students have ever graduated high school.
But
on Groote Eylandt there is the GEMCO manganese mine – one of the
richest such projects in the world. The FIFOs have it well – I stayed
where they do in Anungu however it is a different story for the rest of
the island. Talk about Native Title failing a community. In general,
Native Title is a longstanding debacle as a holistic compensatory
mechanism. I spent time on Groote Eylandt in responding to the suicide
related trauma of a family who lost their 13 year old daughter in April.
The island community had a resident counsellor predominately for the
FIFOs but no resident counsellors for the locals. I met with the Land
Council and we agreed that half a million dollars be set aside for two
resident counsellors – female and male.
The
degradation of homeland communities across northern and western
Australia is the work of one government after another, who are
responsible either in stripping social infrastructure and assets from
these communities or who have denied the equivalency of services and
opportunities to these communities when compared to non-Aboriginal
communities.
It
was reported that in the week after Johnny’s suicide, that a
22-year-old Groote Eylandt man was sentenced to a jail for a Christmas
Day ‘crime’ in 1998. He was found guilty of stealing biscuits and
cordial from the GEMCO storeroom. Jamie Wurramara was jailed for a
so-called $23 crime.
The
public outcries come and go and are forgotten, but the broken and
ruined lives mount. The toll may eventually become insurmountable. Why?
We do need royal commissions but with a focus on so much more that the nation’s eyes and ears need lending to.
- The Grim Statistics:
- There are four adult prisons in the Northern Territory – Alice Springs Correctional Centre which has more prisoners than prescribed capacity (122 per cent), Darwin Correctional Centre, Barkly Work Camp (also beyond capacity, 136 per cent) and Datjala Work Camp. According to the Northern Territory Government there were nearly 3,300 individuals as prison entrants. At any one time there are nearly 1,400 prisoners in the Territory jails. The rate of imprisonment in the Territory is among the highest in the world – at last count 882 incarcerated per 100,000 adults. The national rate of imprisonment is 191 per 100,000 adults. The Indigenous jailing rate in the Northern Territory is 2,954 per 100,000 adults – one of the world’s highest. The Indigenous jailing rate in Western Australia is 3,686 per 100,000 adults – and is fluctuates between the world’s highest and second highest jailing rate (sadly competing with the Black American adult jailing rate).
- The Territory’s population is around 250,000, with 80,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
- One in 80 Northern Territorians in any one year are in jail while at any one time one in 120 Territorians are in jail, higher than the rate of jailing of the mother of jailers, the United States of America – 1 in 131.
- 84 per cent of the prison population is comprised of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
- There are two juvenile detention centres in the Northern Territory – Alice Springs Youth Detention Centre and Don Dale Youth Detention Centre.
- There are also non-custodial orders administered through eight regional offices throughout the Northern Territory.
- With the Northern Territory’s juvenile detention population last year there were more 230 youths who at one time or another were locked up. 94 per cent were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth. 28 per cent of the youth in juvenile detention were aged less than 15 years.
- Australia’s juvenile detention rate is the world’s highest. Ranked second is the United States’ juvenile detention rate.
Aboriginal children's day today
At the Don Dale juvenile detention centre in Darwin, whose brutal mistreatment of Aboriginal boys has just been reported worldwide, a 15-year-old orphaned Aboriginal boy took his life only days after being locked up for $90 worth of ‘crimes’ (full story above).
Australia has the world’s highest rate of juvenile detention with the mother of all jailers, the United States of America, ranked second behind Australia. The juvenile detention rate gets worse, higher, the more west you travel across the Australian continent, with the Northern Territory and Western Australia highest.
These children are screaming out for help and instead of listening to them we brutalise them; maltreating, abusing, degrading, diminishing, bashing, isolating them.
Aboriginal Children’s Day’ is held on 4 August each year, coordinated by the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC), the non-government peak body in Australia representing the interests of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families.
NACCHO Aboriginal Health News states in a communique:
"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are:
* more than twice as likely to be born with a low birthweight
* nine times as likely to be living away from their families in out of home care; and
* a staggering 26 times as likely to be in detained in the justice system.
* Too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are separated from their families, with one in five living in alternative care. One third of these children are placed with non-indigenous carers."
A new #VACCHO book celebrates breastfeeding in Aboriginal communities.
“The support and encouragement from the whole Community matters. VACCHO is pleased to launch Yarning About Breastfeeding: Celebrating Our Stories, sharing Aboriginal families’ breastfeeding stories.
This book is also inclusive of the stories of fathers and grandparents because the people closest to mothers make a big difference to mum starting and continuing to breastfeed.
"It’s important to talk about the joys and importantly, the challenges of parents and boorais (babies) when it comes to breastfeeding.”
'Jail is part of our life and part of being institutionalised'
Every night, one in 15 Indigenous men in WA will spend the night in jail – the chief justice of the supreme court says it is hard to think of a population group on the planet that is incarcerated at a similar rate
https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2016/aug/04/indigenous-advocate-jail-is-part-of-our-life-and-part-of-being-institutionalised