When Sam* feels overwhelmed, she makes a hissing noise like her cat, Socks. She spends hours watching the cat slink across the old pine floorboards, watching its back stiffen when its defensive instincts kick in.
Sam smiles when she’s with Socks but she can’t tell you whether she’s feeling happy. She can’t explain when she’s angry or upset. She can’t find the words to tell someone they need to back off – so she has started to mimic the cat’s hiss. Everyone seems to understand what that means.
“She sort of mirrors what she sees,” says Alice*, the girl’s grandmother and legal guardian. “If you are angry at her and you’re yelling at her face, she will yell at you as well.
“I think living in this world is very scary for her. She loves to draw and colour in and she gets all excited about little childish things but then there’s also the other side of her which is a teenager swearing at you. People see that side.”
Sam is a 14-year-old First Nations girl from Cairns. She has foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, known as FASD, and other severe intellectual disabilities. She has been assessed as having the mental capacity of a kindergarten child and the language skills of a toddler younger than three.
When Sam got Socks three years ago, she had never seen the inside of the Cairns police watch house. At 14 she has been in the cells at least 10 times, mostly for petty offending – at first stealing from shops – and sometimes for acting violently.
She has twice been found mentally unable to stand trial. She is also designated as a “serious repeat offender” by the Queensland government, which means she’s on a blacklist of children, mostly Indigenous, who are targeted by police youth crime operations. In the lead-up to the state election in October, a record number of children have wound up in the police cells, where they can be held for weeks because there are no beds in youth detention centres.
Guardian Australia and SBS The Feed have seen security and body-worn camera footage and other documents that reveal what happened to Sam after she was arrested and taken to the Cairns watch house on two occasions, in August and October 2023. She was 13.
The footage shows Sam being led into an isolation cell that kids call “the box”. Police call it the “padded cell” but the walls are hard like concrete, painted the beige-yellow colour of porridge. The room is used to hold dangerous and violent adult prisoners, and children, like Sam, who don’t fit into another “box”.
Her screams echo into the narrow corridor. The cops huddle outside. They peer through the slit in the door, a vertical glass panel less than 3cm wide. “Is that a kid in there?” asks an officer.
The girl in the box has her face hidden under tangled black curls, her wiry body not quite 150cm tall. Sam is wailing about the cold but won’t cover herself with the blanket by the door. She is naked, shivering, covered in her own urine and refusing to put on a white prison smock.
She bangs her head against the cell door.
“I’ll do you a deal,” a police officer calls out from the corridor of the watch house. “Put your clothes on and I’ll get you a juice.”
“But I’ll still smell like piss,” Sam screams back into the void of the watch house.
‘She’s unable to link the dots’
The hours-long standoff helps to explain Sam and hundreds of others like her, whose neurological disabilities have put them into youth prisons and watch houses. She’s not capable of doing “a deal” with police because of her condition, which severely impairs her ability to make decisions. Children with FASD struggle to link action and consequence; many then get swept into a justice system designed to show them “swift and serious consequences”.
Sam’s family tried to involve her in team sport as a young girl, but “she just ended up running off with the ball”, her grandmother says. At school she had a tendency to hide away under the desk or in a cupboard.
“I knew her mum had drunk a lot of alcohol and I was aware of certain conditions you can get from using substances in pregnancy,” Alice says. “She was a very stubborn child, even at nine months she refused the bottle. I remember many days of trying to get her to latch on to the various different bottles, teats.”
Authorities estimate that FASD affects 2% of the Australian population, roughly 520,000 people. Some estimates are much higher. A national register lists just 1,262 cases diagnosed in children aged under 15 in almost a decade.
There is overwhelming evidence that the condition – combined with extremely low rates of diagnosis and intervention for young people – is a critical factor in understanding the offending behaviour in a cohort of young repeat offenders. It is these children, the ones seemingly unable to break the spiral of detention and offending, who have caused the most angst within the Queensland community.
In 2019 clinicians from the Telethon Kids Institute examined 99 children in the Banksia Hill detention centre in Western Australia. They found that 36 had FASD, though only two had previously been diagnosed. Nine out of 10 had some form of serious neurological disorder.
Many young people are only diagnosed when they enter the youth justice system. One New South Wales-based family, caring for three adopted children with FASD, says they were told “the best way to get support is to go to prison”.
Dr Heidi Zeeman, a neuropsychologist who worked in the Queensland justice system for 20 years, says one of the main reasons young people end up in detention is because their intellectual capacity has not been determined previously.
“So they may have gone through a child protection system or they may have gone through out-of-home care, they may have dropped out of school early, there may be substance-use issues,” Zeeman says. “All of those things tend to cloud what’s going on fundamentally with that young person, and they tend to miss timely and targeted assessment.
“FASD affects young people’s behaviour through irritability, aggression, difficulty, and self-regulating – so not really knowing how to cope in stressful situations, not understanding the consequences of actions thereafter.
“As you would expect in brain injury conditions, typically it [affects] things that require executive function. So that means decision-making, it means planning and organising [and] responding appropriately to the environment.”
Alice says Sam never coped with school but that for years “people just saw it as [being] naughty”.
“She’s unable to link the dots around things. If I’ve said ‘you can’t ride your pushbike on the road without a helmet’, she may go down the sidestreet and ride her pushbike without a helmet. You’ve always got to remind her of everyday things like bathing, cleaning your teeth, how to dress appropriately, what’s clean, what’s dirty. She doesn’t understand that. Night and day doesn’t really make sense to her.”
‘Grooming children to be adult criminals’
Thumbing through children’s court documents and reports about the youth justice system, patterns are repeated. Sentences are handed down to protect the community. Many of the children are there because of failures to protect them.
Take Brian*, a 14-year-old boy from Cairns with severe FASD. One sodden night in February 2022 he took a cocktail of drugs, including ice and THC. Just after midnight Brian and five other teenagers piled into a stolen car. For 30 minutes they drove through the city, occasionally chased by the police as the roads became slick from the rain. The car ploughed into a tree. A boy, 15, whom Brian thought of as “like a brother” was killed. The others were seriously injured.
When the then premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, was asked about the crash, she said: “These children should be at home with their parents and loved ones”.
At Brian’s sentencing, the court heard he came from an unsafe, abusive home where he “witnessed physical domestic violence involving his mother and her boyfriends on a regular basis”.
“He turned to alcohol and drugs at an early age … he used alcohol or other drugs [including cannabis, MDMA, ice and ‘mushrooms’] every day – and sought out the company of similarly disengaged and troubled children.”
Brian’s psychologist described him as living in “the eternal present” – unable to learn from the past or plan for the future.
Another example: this year two brothers – Peter*, 16, and Greg*, 15, both diagnosed with FASD – were arrested for various offences, including car theft, and detained for more than two weeks in Brisbane watch houses.
A letter seen by Guardian Australia was sent by youth workers to department officials at the time. It sought the urgent transfer of the brothers out of the watch house and detailed several allegations about their treatment over 15 days, including that the boys had been denied blankets overnight as punishment for talking; that they were kept overnight in solitary confinement; and that Greg was not given his medication.
“If they’re not medicated they get very heightened,” says Penny*, who is the boys’ kinship carer and legal guardian.
“The longer that they continue watch house detention or in the detention centres that are supposed to be therapeutic, which I’ve never seen, it’s just grooming these children to be adult criminals.”
Katherine Hayes, the chief executive of the Youth Advocacy Centre, says children are leaving watch houses and detention centres traumatised and more likely to reoffend.
“The conditions that the kids are held in are brutal. It’s a really awful environment for young people. It’s damaging and traumatising.
“The government is turning a blind eye to the treatment of kids in the watch houses because it sees only its political gain by treating these kids harshly. It is not in their political interest to introduce long-term strategies because it takes too long for that outcome to be reached. So instead the government is looking at a policing strategy – and it’s not a policing problem.”
Children in adult watch houses
In February the Queensland police service announced with fanfare its youth crime operation, Taskforce Guardian, had arrested 1,000 children. The operation involves a team of detectives flying into different communities, targeting certain children and taking a “zero tolerance” approach to prosecuting bail breaches.
The same week there were 75 young people being held in Queensland’s adult police watch houses, where their human rights have been formally overridden by an act of the state parliament.
The situation is unique to Queensland. Children who are remanded by the courts can be kept for weeks in the police station holding block – full of drunk and abusive and violent adults – until a bed becomes available in youth detention. With the state election due in October, the arrests have ramped up. Sometimes police have to keep four kids together in a watch house cell with a single concrete bed and an open toilet.
For Sam, the watch house is the point at which a downward spiral seems to accelerate. Her police file says she’s a violent prisoner who bites, scratches and kicks. When she’s being moved, officers are required to place her in handcuffs and leg shackles.
“When she was younger, she would see police in a positive light,” Alice says. “But now she gets very fearful and has a reaction even when they want to stop her and talk to her. So she can have an overreaction now because of the past watch house experiences.
“Some police officers have said to me they don’t care [about her disability] and that they’ve been told to arrest her for everything. And even though the watch house is not the right place for her, they’ve been directed to continue to arrest her.
“When she gets arrested and ends up in the watch house she doesn’t fully understand why she is there. And if I go to visit her, she will say, ‘Can you take me home?’”
Already this year – since the occasions shown in the footage – Sam has been arrested and taken to watch houses at least five times.
The Queensland police service said it sought to minimise the time children spend in watch houses, and that they “remain safe, healthy and supported”.
The boy who stole a torch
Tim Spall, a psychologist who worked for Queensland’s Child and Youth Mental Health Service, has spent more than 20 years building connections with kids to help divert them from crime. He tells the story of the boy who stole his torch.
In his time at the Inala clinic in Brisbane helping First Nations kids, including hundreds who have been through the criminal justice system, Spall only ever had one thing taken: a lousy plastic torch worth about $5 that went missing from a car.
Two weeks later the torch came back with “this tough, hardened, resilient kid”.
“And he gave it back to me, in tears,” Spall says. “Society is telling these kids who they are. And when you tell them otherwise, you see who they really are.”
Spall, a Gija man from the Kimberley, says he’s worked with more than 50 – “probably closer to a hundred” – young people who have wound up dead from suicide. There are families who have lost multiple children; younger kids, not yet 10, who have become so used to the “sorry business” they don’t cry at funerals.
“[Being placed in the youth justice system] sort of says to them, ‘This is your value in society. This is who you are,’” Spall says. “They try to find themselves in that system and they ultimately end up looking into that mirror that says that they don’t belong, that they’re not wanted in society, that they are not part of a society. That they’re not able to come out the other side of that with a positive outcome.”
But the opposite is also true. Spall says helping children understand their strengths can give them purpose; a sense that they fit in the community.
“I understand the victim of a motor vehicle theft, I understand that victim thinking, ‘This young person stole my car, they need to be punished’. Absolutely. You can’t steal someone’s car and not have a consequence.
“My argument is that consequence should lead to better outcomes for both. If we don’t do that we are feeding these kids back into the same system … where they come back out and commit the same offence again. We’ve got to find an alternative to that, and a viable alternate that’s going to actually change the image of who they think they are.”
‘It goes round in circles’
In late October 2023, just after 9am, Sam was approached by two Taskforce Guardian police officers in the car park of a Bunnings hardware store in suburban Cairns. She panicked and was arrested for resisting police. The charge sheet alleges she was violent, dropped her weight and kicked the door of a police car.
Police records do not indicate clearly why the girl was approached in the first place. It’s also unclear whether they consulted a formal “intervention plan” that warns them about her disability, advises officers to avoid touching her, and to “seriously consider whether [she is] fit for custody”.
Alice, who was summoned to the watch house a few hours later, calls that afternoon the worst she has ever seen her granddaughter.
In the cells, Sam begins to bang her head against a cell door, and punch herself in the face. “I didn’t do anything,” she screams. “Why do I have to stay in here if I didn’t do anything?”
For her own safety, she’s taken to the isolation cell again.
“Where are you moving me to?”
“To the nice comfy cell,” an officer responds. She begins to panic.
The officer turns to a colleague in frustration. “No one can get anywhere with her, this is what it’s like, it goes round in circles.”
*All names of children and their carers have been changed due to legal restrictions on reporting on children in the justice system
In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International
