The public servant in charge of Queensland’s youth detention system has apologised for a government department’s refusal to provide the children’s court with information related to the prolonged solitary confinement of a boy, 13, with developmental disorders.
The judgment, reported by Guardian Australia on Monday, raised serious concerns about the treatment of the boy. Judge Tracy Fantin said his incarceration at the Cleveland youth detention centre had been “cruel”, “inappropriate” and a direct breach of the state’s youth justice principles.
“If you treat a child like an animal, it is unsurprising that they may behave like an animal,” Fantin said.
The youth justice minister, Leanne Linard, said on Tuesday that following the judge’s comments, she had asked for a briefing about the management of the boy.
“It is my expectation that young people in our detention centres are always treated appropriately,” Linard said.
The boy, who has foetal alcohol syndrome and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, was detained for 122 days in relation to the robbery of a trolley collector at a shopping centre.
Fantin requested information from the Queensland Department of Children, Youth Justice and Multicultural Affairs related to the child’s incarceration at the Cleveland youth detention centre in Townsville.
The department initially refused. Fantin then issued a court order to obtain the information.
“An order was necessary because the [department] declined to release the information I had requested to assist me on sentence without a court order,” Fantin said in her published judgment.
“When one sees the information, its declining to do so is unsurprising, because that information contains the regime of detention which you have been subjected to.”
The information detailed how during a period of 87 days, he was confined to his cell for more than 20 hours on 78 of those days.
For 10 days, he was confined to his cell for the entire 24 hours.
Guardian Australia asked the department why it had initially refused to provide the court with information, and whether it was seeking to conceal the extent of solitary confinement experienced by the boy.
Its director general, Deidre Mulkerin, said regional staff were provided with “incorrect advice about the required process to produce the documents requested by the children’s court”.
“While I’m pleased the judge did receive the information she needed, I acknowledge this should never have happened that way,” Mulkerin said.
“I apologise sincerely, and I will personally be writing to Judge Fantin to express this.
“I want to reassure our judiciary and all Queenslanders that we are committed to working with our colleagues in the justice system.”
The decision follows several recent cases where the children’s court has raised alarm about inappropriate conditions in overcrowded and understaffed youth detention centres, and adult police watch houses where an increasing number of children are being held.
Magistrates and judges have taken those conditions into account when making bail and sentencing decisions.
Fantin said the boy’s lengthy incarceration and circumstances were “very significant mitigating factors in your favour”.
Earlier this month a Mount Isa-based children’s court magistrate, Eoin Mac Giolla Ri, granted bail to a teenage girl after saying he was “conscious” that she may otherwise end up in an adult police watch house.
In a separate case in January, Mac Giolla Ri expressed concern about children being held in watch houses where “adult detainees are often drunk, abusive, psychotic or suicidal”.
These decisions come amid heightened debate about youth crime, government moves to impose more punitive measures on children and political attacks on the judiciary.
At issue is the government’s stated desire to remand and imprison some children on community safety grounds, and conflicting human rights principles – codified in the state’s Youth Justice Act – that demand children be detained in appropriate facilities and only as a last resort.
The deputy premier, Steven Miles, said last month that the safety of residents was being “held to ransom by rogue courts and rogue justices”, after the release of 13 children who were being held in the Townsville police watch house.
Police appeals against two of those bail decisions were shaping as a test for youth bail laws and the Queensland Human Rights Act, and the authority of the judiciary to take conditions of imprisonment into account.
Neither of those appeals is now likely to come before the court. Guardian Australia understands that in one case, the child pleaded guilty and has been sentenced. In the other, a child has been rearrested and remanded.
