Ricky stays in the second house on the left. The first place is a regular night-time hangout for teenagers who use drugs, break into homes and steal cars. Hard rubbish and glass from broken windows stretches from the front step out on to the road, slowing cars (and cops) from entering the street.
“That’s the ice dealer, there,” says Ricky’s friend, pointing at a brick place up the street and across the road with black sheets wadded into the windows. “The cops come through here sometimes two, three times a week. I’ve never seen them go up to that house.”
Ricky, 14, is an Aboriginal boy from Cairns. He says he’s been to Cleveland youth detention centre “probably 15 or 16 times” since he was 10. The last stretch was for about seven months, including periods in behavioural management cells for violence towards guards and weeks locked in solitary confinement.
Ricky (not his real name) is the sort of kid who gets talked about a lot, as community anger about youth crime in Queensland has reached the point where groups of vigilantes are patrolling the streets and converging on the homes of young First Nations people.
The Queensland government lists him on its “serious repeat offender” index. Children on the blacklist are disproportionately Indigenous, actively targeted by police, and told they belong in prison. Media reports call them the “worst of the worst”.
Ricky is a violent criminal. Ricky is a slender boy with a peach fuzz moustache who wears a basketball singlet. He sprawls on a lounge, clutching a pillow under his arm, covering himself with a blanket. When we speak (with his parents’ consent, after an introduction by youth workers) he has been out of detention for two days. By the end of that week he’ll be back in custody, where he remains.
“It feels like a dream to get out, it feels like a dream come true,” he says.
“You get out and you expect to do good, but the only thing you’re good at is breaking in stealing cars and that’s what you know best.
“You could be making plans in there for when you get out, that you’re going to do good, and when you get out you get peer-pressured from your boys and you go on a mission to do what you do best.
“I think about the consequences of my actions. But I know I am going back there, so I’ll just get the most freedom I can.”
‘There’s nothing there to help us’
In the four years since Ricky was first sent to youth detention, he says his involvement in criminal behaviour has escalated. At first he was arrested for minor property offending and stealing.
“If you look at my history now it’s for robberies and car speed chases, it’s shot through the roof in the last couple of years,” he says.
In that same time period, Queensland has repeatedly “toughened” its approach to young offenders to the extent it has now overridden its Human Rights Act in order to arrest children for breaches of bail conditions. In less than two months, 169 children were charged with the new offence.
The result of punitive government policies has been a record number of young people in a chronically understaffed detention system. When no more children can be crammed inside youth detention centres, they are kept for long periods – in some cases up to six weeks – in adult police holding cells.
Queensland’s human rights commissioner says this situation breaches international law and the state’s own Youth Justice Act.
At Cleveland, staff shortages have resulted in children being kept for weeks in solitary confinement. Courts have compared their treatment to the caging of “animals”.
“It’s just like [being in] a box, a room with a toilet … a window, that’s it,” Ricky says.
“[Being in solitary confinement] made me into a very violent person towards people, the way I talk to them, the way I act around them.
“The way that it messes you up, it doesn’t make you the same on the outside. You used to be quiet or whatnot, when you get out you’re not the same.
“It’s just made me feel like it’s the end of the world, I don’t really care. I just want to hurt people, that’s the feeling I get, because I’m a very hurt person too when I’m in there for that long. I hurt a lot in there too, you know.”
The state government calls solitary confinement “separation”. It says that at all times during a separation young people have access to visits and professional support services, phone calls, education material, meal routines and recreational activities.
Ricky says he wants to do schoolwork in detention, but in the past five months the most he got was a single worksheet. Whistleblowers say school buildings in the complex were mostly empty for months, as kids were kept in their units almost permanently.
“To me when I go in there, there’s nothing there to help us,” Ricky says.
“When I’m in there for that long I think about shit, [I] could have been this, could have been that. And then you think ‘now that I’m hurt I don’t care if I hurt anyone’. Yeah, bro, you just go crazy.”
‘We were setting him up to fail’
Two years ago, Ricky was granted bail in the children’s court and referred to a rehabilitative program run by First Nations elders at a camp in the remote Queensland bush. The youth workers involved believed it could be a critical intervention for a boy, not yet a teenager at the time, whose criminal behaviour was trending in a troubling direction.
“That was a part of his healing process,” someone involved with the camp, who asked not to be identified, says.
“We worked very hard to get him on that camp … and in the end it felt like we were setting him up to fail.”
After Ricky’s release from detention, the Queensland police service appealed against his bail to the supreme court, which agreed it should be revoked. Police said they sensitively negotiated his return to custody from the camp but emails from organisers described what occurred as “horrific”.
When informed he was being taken to the police, Ricky became distressed and tried to flee. He kicked the windows of the vehicle, ran into the bush, climbed a tree and attempted suicide.
Ricky says he felt desperate after he was taken from the camp, like freedom was for other people. Nowhere – in his cell, or in the streets – could he hope to seek healing or help.
“If you think you’re wanted and you’re looking over your shoulder, you know, there’s nothing else to do and you just make it worse,” he says.
“You need support if you want to do good.”
He says he and other Indigenous children are routinely hassled by police.
“They target me. The other day me and my brother were going to the shop and we were doubling on a bike. [An officer] stuck his head out the window and he says ‘oi you little black c’s, jump off the bike or I’ll give you a ticket’. He said ‘get off your girlfriend’s bike’ because it had pink on it.
“This other time I was breaking in and whatnot and they caught us … they tried to choke me and said I’m leaving in a body bag, bro. Saying they’ll bash me right up. When I got to the watch house they had to drag me across the floor just to get to a cell.
“When I’m on foot, I get paranoid. Even if I’m clean I still don’t want to talk to them, if they pull me up I’ll tell them my name and I’ll just keep walking.”
Police declined a request for interview. In a statement, the QPS said juvenile serious repeat offenders were causing “a disproportionate amount of harm to the community” and that police had dedicated resources to deal with them. It said there were processes in place to ensure any use of force against a child was reasonable, and complied with the Human Rights Act.
A system against them
In Facebook neighbourhood watch groups, people from Cairns and other regional Queensland cities post photographs of mostly Aboriginal boys and girls, accusing them of crimes and talking only half-jokingly about wanting them dead. Posts refer to them as “gutter rats” and “cockroaches”.
There are plenty, especially victims of crime, who believe children like Ricky are unworthy of sympathy or study.
“One of the real challenges that we have is the tone and the narrative around how we characterise young people and groups of young people,” says Natalie Lewis, a Gamilaraay woman and a commissioner of the Queensland Family and Child Commission.
Lewis says the demonisation of young people – amid heightened public debate about youth crime in Queensland and the perception of a “crisis” – has led some to view children’s rights and the rights of victims of crime as “an either-or proposition”.
“I’ve worked in this space for 25 years; I was a youth worker and a case manager … when I think about those young people I’ve interacted with they absolutely have the capacity to want to change and to do better. They certainly have aspirations, but what they don’t have is the means to get there.
“We place [so many] barriers in front of them that hope is no longer a valuable currency. We’re not supporting them in the types of tangible and practical ways that where they want to be in one year, five years, 10 years’ time is attainable for them.”
The people trying to support Ricky – his social workers and youth justice workers – say he is the sort of kid who could break the cycle of crime, with the right support. He is bright and has previously been engaged with schooling. He is unfailingly polite and affectionate towards a few youth workers who have gained his trust.
But he is pulled in different directions by an incoherent system. Efforts to help him are frequently in conflict with blunt policing tactics and brutal conditions in custody. To some, he’s a vulnerable child in need of support. To others he will only ever be a “hardened criminal” who belongs in a cell.
One state government source says she believes political decisions that have allowed police to become the de facto lead agency for youth justice have pushed the system to the point of breakdown.
“You know they talk about the carrot and the stick,” the senior youth justice worker says. “Well now we’re luring kids with the carrot, so the police can use the stick to whack them over the head.
“The system demonstrates to these kids again and again that it’s against them. So they might as well line up on the other side.”
No escape
Ricky and his mates greet one another with the same dap handshake – palms upright, fingers loose, right shoulder bowed in at contact. Fleeting eye contact, no smile.
I watch them do it three times, trying to figure out the mechanics. Then when Ricky offers his hand, my attempt is about as awkward as you would expect. He grins to himself. These kids have an instinct to detect those who have grown up on the same streets, and the impostors (cops, journalists, whoever) who might like to pretend they can relate.
“For me, I got a habit of stealing cars, you know, property crime, and I reckon for the younger fellas they just keep looking up to the older fellas like me,” he says. “And I look up to the big boys, you know.
“I wanted to be like them and that habit, it comes to you and you keep doing it.”
Peter Malouf, an Indigenous academic from James Cook University in Townsville, says young people “form relationships with others who have the same experience”.
“The majority of the kids in the juvenile justice system are coming through the child safety system, where they’re coming from broken homes, they’re placed into foster care, they’re feeling a sense of rejection, a feeling of no hope,” Malouf says.
“The only way to deal with their emotions and feelings is to resort to criminal activity.”
Ricky is on the same trajectory as those in his peer group. Most say they have had bad experiences with the police. Setting himself on a different path means leaving the street littered with debris and the kids with the same handshake.
Last year, when Ricky was 13, youth workers and government agencies jointly arranged for the boy and his father to leave Cairns for a fresh start. Ricky was released from detention and boarded a bus to another town, several hundred kilometres away, where he was booked into local accommodation.
Plans were made to enrol him in school and link him with support services. Youth justice and child safety signed off. The police were informed.
When Ricky stepped off the bus he was, in his words, “ambushed” at the door by several local police officers, who had been alerted to the relocation plan. They arrested him in relation to an old allegation which dated prior to his last stint in detention. Police said the arrest was “to finalise the outstanding serious criminal matters” and appropriate.
Ricky was taken to the police holding cells and held on remand. That night, Ricky’s father attempted to check into accommodation, but was told the booking had been cancelled. Police had contacted the premises, which refused to allow them to stay.
A youth worker who accompanied the family says they believe the charge was “a pretext” to stop Ricky from relocating. The impact was to leave the boy feeling hopeless about his prospects.
“He said to me that he knew that no matter what he did, that he couldn’t escape. He felt like it was going to follow him wherever he went.”
Ricky was eventually released and spent a couple of days at a caravan park with his father. Police knocked on the door to conduct “checks” multiple times a day. They returned to Cairns.
“For me I reckon the biggest thing would be to move away from Cairns,” he says. “I’ve got no good friends, all my friends are those that are stealing cars and whatnot, yeah.
“We had talks about moving away from Cairns and all this crime life, we’re still working on it, getting there. It’s not easy.”
Written Off seeks to detail the experiences of young people in Queensland’s justice system, where record numbers of children are being arrested and imprisoned. Know more? Contact ben.smee@theguardian.com
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123 and the domestic abuse helpline is 0808 2000 247. In the US, the suicide prevention lifeline is 988 and the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines can be found via www.befrienders.org
