AN IMAGE REMINISCENT OF THE INFAMOUS ABU GHRAIB PRISON IN IRAQ WAS TAKEN IN A YOUTH DETENTION CENTRE IN AUSTRALIA, PROMPTING OUTRAGE IN THE COUNTRY.
The stark image of a young man sitting slumped in a mechanical restraint chair, a grey hood pulled over his head, his neck, hands and feet bound, has sparked outrage in Australia.
The image, reminiscent of a torture chamber in one of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s jails or even the infamous American prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, comes from the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory, a facility for young men — children, really — in trouble with the law.
The teen, Dylan Voller, featured in an investigation by the Australian Broadcasting Corp. TV program Four Corners. In a hard-hitting program, which screened Monday night, it exposed the rampant and systemic abuse of youths — many of them Aboriginal — in the territory’s correction system.
Within hours, a “shocked and appalled” Malcolm Turnbull, the Australian prime minister, announced the setting up of a royal commission to find out what happened and why.
Northern Territory Corrections Minister John Elferink was fired Tuesday.
Voller was chained and hooded because he had apparently said he would hurt himself, according to correction officials. He also had anger issues and a propensity to spit.
But the shocking program also detailed how young inmates were tear-gassed and placed in the detention centre’s isolation unit for weeks at a time.
In 2014, for example, Dylan was one of six boys who were tear-gassed. It was claimed the treatment was handed out to quell a “riot,” but closed-circuit television and video recordings made by staff show that only one boy escaped from his cell after it was left unlocked by a guard, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Corrections officers are shown tear-gassing the children, most of whom were in their cells, wrestling them to the ground and calling them “little f---ers.”
Other footage, taken in 2010, showed Dylan being thrown across his cell, kneed and knocked to the ground, repeatedly stripped naked and kept in solitary confinement, the Sydney Morning Herald said.
The young inmates were also kept in solitary confinement without natural light, running water or airflow, places that apparently reeked of urine.
“Like all Australians, we are shocked by the report, by that evidence that was shown on Four Corners last night. Deeply shocked. We have moved swiftly to get to the bottom of it,” Turnbull told ABC radio.
“We need to get all the facts out as swiftly as we can. We need to expose the cultural problems, the administrative problems that allowed this type of mistreatment to occur.
“We want to know how this came about, we want to know what lessons can be learned from it. We want to know why there were inquiries into this centre which did not turn up the evidence and the information that we saw on Four Corners last night. This is a shocking state of affairs and we will move quickly to establish what happened.”
In a handwritten letter made public Tuesday by his lawyer, Peter O’Brien, Dylan, now 17, thanked the “whole Australian community for the support you have showed us boys as well as our families.”
He admitted he was no angel.
“I would also like to take this opportunity to apologize to the community for my wrongs and I can’t wait to get out and make up for them,” wrote the soccer-loving young man from Alice Spring. He was incarcerated after he went on a 24-hour crime spree, attacking two men and a police officer while high on methamphetamine.
O’Brien said Tuesday Dylan, who is now being held in an adult prison, should be released immediately.
“The impact of these years of brutalization must be immediately measured and he needs immediate assistance,” the lawyer said.
“Any child locked up in solitary confinement in the Northern Territory needs to be released immediately.”
A social worker who has cared for Dylan said the teen “has been in and out of trouble, needs to get serious counselling and it needs to be funded by the government.”
“If a boy commits a crime, I’m not saying they don’t have to face the music, but where’s the duty of care? They need a place where they can be safe,” he told the News Corp Australia website.
Dylan’s sister Kira said her brother “deserves his life back” and had “lost everything … lost hope.”
“The last time I went to visit him there was no smile, there was no emotion, there was nothing. I couldn’t give him anything to be positive about and that really broke me,” she said.
“I want him to know he’s still a person and people still love him and he still has hope for a life.”
It’s not as if the territory wasn’t given a chance to fix the problem.
Four Corners discovered Dylan’s mistreatment was the basis of a lengthy investigation by the former Northern Territory children’s commissioner, Dr. Howard Bath.
The full investigation was presented to the government in 2012, but was never publicly released or tabled in parliament.