300 people from various Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous supporters gathered in Perth’s Forrest Chase public square on Wednesday October 25 to protest the death in custody of 16-year-old Cleveland Dodd.

Dodd’s death on October 12 is the latest in a series of horrors inside Western Australia’s (WA) juvenile detention system, a system that been condemned as illegal by the Supreme Court and criticised in open court by a senior presiding judge.

The Banksia Hill Detention Centre has been in chaos for years. The site of many riots and attempts at self-harm and suicide, the situation was exposed in a November 2022 Four Corners program that utilized CCTV and guards’ body cam footage of mistreatment.

In July 2022, the government started sending some juvenile offenders to Unit 18 inside the adult Casuarina prison.

In May 2023, Greens Upper House Member of Parliament (MP) Brad Pettitt tabled in parliament 57 complaint letters which had been sent to the Department of Justice (DOJ) by the Aboriginal Legal Service of WA (ALSWA) on behalf of 51 detainees about the conditions at Banksia Hill and Unit 18.

The letters described ongoing violence and sexual abuse of detainees. In Unit 18, detainees are kept alone in their cells for up to 23 hours a day, despite the Supreme Court ruling that practice illegal in July.

Authorities claim that Dodd suicided. However, his family told the Perth rally that shortly before his death he had happily told his grandmother that he was looking forward to his release, which was to be in two days’ time.

Dodd’s grandmother, Glenda Mippy, told the rally that she wants Unit 18 shut down. “It took his life,” she said. “He shouldn’t have been there.”

The rally was told that there are 12 young people currently held in Unit 18. There have been 20 suicide attempts and 350 attempted self-harms since the unit opened last year.

The day after Cleveland Dodd died, Children’s Court president, Judge Hylton Quail sentenced a 15-year-old who had spent a large amount of time in and out of Unit 18.

Quail told the youth before the court that it seems, “that those who administer Unit 18 do so with impunity.”

“Those conditions in Unit 18 and the way that you have been treated whilst you have been in custody have been of no rehabilitative effect. You have therefore been released into the community more dangerous than when you went in.”

He went on to say that the conditions for prisoners in Unit 18 are “by far and away the worst conditions of incarceration of any group in this state, worse than any adult prison.”

“It is clear that you have been brutalized and alienated,” he told the youth before him. “And in turn, you have reacted against those who are responsible — directly responsible for looking after you in the detention centre.”

Quail referenced the July Supreme Court ruling that the 23 hour solitary lockdowns were illegal. However, they are continuing.

“I am lost for words that nothing has changed since then and the situation in Unit 18 seems to be getting progressively worse,” he said.