'We’re not miracle workers, we just gave a sh*t': Getting children out of prison

The transfer of nearly 20 children to a maximum security prison in Western Australia has shone a spotlight on Australia's approach to juvenile justice.

At the start of the Covid pandemic, all of the outreach services at Western Australia’s only youth prison pulled out.

This gave Gerry Georgatos a chance.

The suicide prevention and poverty researcher, who helped to establish the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Suicide Prevention Evaluation Project, had long been lobbying the state government for a chance to work with the children incarcerated in the state.

With the impact of the country-wide lockdown, the government finally turned to Georgatos, who, along with his daughter Connie and Megan Krakouer, was handed a modest grant to provide a wide-remit restorative model at Banksia Hill.

The $50,000 grant covered the trio’s work for an eight week period in early 2020.

“I said, ‘we’re not going to get this chance again’,” Georgatos says. “So we showed them what real restorative work looks like.”

“We unpacked their stories and worked with them. I believe no-one is beyond hope, even the ones who have committed the worst crimes can turn their lives around.”

The group focused on the girls in custody at Banksia, applying to the Children’s Court to get as many of them as possible out of the prison with post-release support.

There were 18 girls incarcerated at Banksia when the group started their work. At the end of the eight-week period in May 2020, there were only seven. The restorative approach had seen more than half of the girls at Banksia released, with support in the community.

“We worked with these kids 24-7, we worked with them when no-one was there,” Georgatos said. “You’ve got to listen and not interrupt with answers, to let them pour out their hearts and tears. That is healing.

“We’re not miracle workers, we just gave a shit.”

Kids in an adult prison

Despite this success, once the lockdown was lifted and the other outreach services returned to Banksia, Georgatos and his team were told their services were no longer needed.

“We were banned from going back inside even though we were making change,” he says. “If we had continued on with this we would have halved the prison population as a whole within a year. It would be a place with less than 50 kids inside. But the moral political will does not exist.”

Last month 17 children incarcerated at the Banksia facility were moved to an ad-hoc facility at Casuarina prison, a maximum security male prison. This shone a spotlight on the juvenile justice system in Australia, and the significant trauma experienced by children incarcerated around the country.

While Georgatos’ approach showed it was possible to help these children, the state has a narrow, carceral approach to youth justice.

“They don’t treat these children as if they’re their own, they treat them as if they’re other than children,” he says. “We did things that should be done, and we did go above the call prescription, but we have to change that remit.

“We need a wide restorative approach or we’re not going to help these young ones. We need a public review of the services on the inside.”

The children that have been moved to the adult prison likely have experienced significant trauma and physical and mental health issues, long before they were incarcerated.

A recent research paper on the health of children sentenced to detention at Banksia in WA found that more than a third of the children had experienced the suicide of a family member. Nearly half of the children had an incarcerated sibling, while 57 per cent had an incarcerated parent.

One-fifth of the children had experienced emotional neglect, physical neglect or physical abuse, while just under 90 per cent had at least one domain of severe neurodevelopmental impairment.

All of the young female particiapnts in the survey had mentioned common experiences of sexual violence, while 52 per cent had post-traumatic stress disorder.

 ‘A corral of human misery’

Australia is effectively criminalising this trauma experienced by the most vulnerable people in the community by placing them in prisons, Georgatos says.

“It dishevels people,” he says. “It leads to a lot of disordered thinking, and that’s trauma itself.

“We have none of the quality psychosocial and psychiatric support to young ones in this country in juvenile detention. We don’t have that in any form whatsoever. What we have is a carceral culture for young ones. It’s a trainwreck journey to ruination.”

The children Georgatos worked with during his time at Banksia came from “crushing forms of abject poverty” and all had experienced a form of a trauma.

“Banksia Hill is a corral of human misery - a hole of human misery. It’s a holding pen,” he says.

“A hundred per cent of these children have a trauma. Some have been born into trauma from the beginning of their lives - they never had a chance. If we take away hope we’re turning people to trainwreck lives and monstering them.

“We were there for them as if we were their family - that’s what we have to translate. We believed in them so they started to believe in themselves.”