Banksia Hill
- Updated
- Inquest
A coroner wants Unit 18 shut ‘urgently’. Roger Cook says it’s ‘the best solution we have at the moment’
Coroner Philip Urquhart said the “harrowing” evidence he heard about Cleveland Dodd’s final days at Unit 18 was some of the “saddest I have presided over”.
- Rebecca Peppiatt
Latest
Banksia Hill 17-hour rooftop riot exposes ‘hopelessness inside’, advocate says
Six detainees, aged between 12 and 17, climbed onto the roof of the Canning Vale youth prison on Monday. Three spent the night up there, damaging anything in their path.
- Carla Hildebrandt
WA youth detention in spotlight as detainees scale Banksia Hill roof
A group of about six youths scaled the roof of Banksia Hill on Monday afternoon, throwing bricks, poles and fire extinguishers as authorities scrambled to bring them down.
- Rebecca Peppiatt
WA’s youth justice system in crisis before 16-year-old’s death: coroner
Everything must be done to ensure another child doesn’t die in youth detention, a coroner has told an inquest for an Indigenous teenager who fatally self-harmed while in custody.
- Aaron Bunch
- Exclusive
- Perth
‘Embrace an element of fun’: WA to spend $120k on artwork for kids detention centre
“The art should embrace an element of fun—to capture play and youth of creativity balancing the deeper themes of hope and belonging with the simple pleasure that art can bring.”
- Hamish Hastie
- Opinion
- Detention centres
Why are we still locking up our children?
Another day, another kid found dead in a prison cell. It’s not the system that needs to change, it’s our thinking.
- Rebecca Peppiatt
WA Justice ‘incompetent and incapable’: Former Children’s Court judge
The retired judge slammed the department that oversees youth justice in WA, telling an inquest he had predicted the tragedy that came to pass last October.
- Rebecca Peppiatt
Cleveland Dodd inquest: Youth wing in high-security prison ‘set up to fail’
The corrections worker who found Cleveland Dodd after he self-harmed says the prison unit where the incident happened “was set up to fail”.
- Aaron Bunch
Judge refuses to send 17-year-old to ‘horrendous’ Perth prison
A 17-year-old Perth boy was released from custody for Christmas despite a serious crime spree, the judge calling the unit he would go to a “barbaric dungeon”.
- Emma Young
- Exclusive
- Prisons
‘Hell in a cell’: Violence inside WA’s Unit 18 youth prison revealed
Detained children are attacking officers with make-shift blades, metal plates and planks of wood as frightening new details emerge about WA’s youth justice system.
- Michael Genovese