In the early hours of 12 October 2023, staff at Unit 18, a wing of the adult, maximum-security Casuarina Prison repurposed to hold children, found a 16-year-old Yamatji boy, Cleveland Dodd, unresponsive in his cell. He died in hospital eleven days later, on 23 October 2023, the first child ever to die in custody in Western Australia's history. More than two years afterward, in December 2025, the coroner who examined his death, Philip Urquhart, called the inquest the saddest he had presided over, and found Unit 18 so dangerous it should be shut "as a matter of urgency" (Coroner's Court of Western Australia, Inquest into the Death of Cleveland Keith Dodd, findings released Dec-2025).
Cleveland was not the last child to die in the state's youth-justice system, and Unit 18 was not an accident. It was created deliberately, by government decision, in July 2022, as a fix for a facility already in crisis: riots, mass lockdowns, and cells so short-staffed that children were confined to them for up to 70 of 72 consecutive hours. What began as a stopgap, moving some of the state's most troubled children into a wing of a men's prison, is, more than three years and a second child's death later, still open. This is the story of how Western Australia's only youth-detention system reached that point, and why a state government found twice by its own Supreme Court to have acted unlawfully has taken so long to fix it.
What the government did
Banksia Hill Detention Centre, in the Perth suburb of Canning Vale, is Western Australia's only facility for children and young people who are remanded or sentenced to custody — the sole such centre for a state covering 2.5 million square kilometres. It has a troubled history that predates this government: a 2013 riot under the former Barnett Liberal-National government caused an estimated $1.5 million in damage (Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services, Directed Review into an Incident at Banksia Hill Detention Centre, 2013). But the crisis this masthead is concerned with began under the McGowan Labor government, in office continuously since March 2017. On 4-6 February 2022, staff shortages left one child locked in his cell for approximately 70 of 72 hours; the Supreme Court later found this, and 25 further days of similar confinement between January and June 2022, unlawful (Supreme Court of Western Australia, Tottle J, 25-Aug-2022, as reported by the Aboriginal Legal Service of WA). In May 2022, a mass disturbance saw dozens of detainees occupy the roof for more than twelve hours, lighting fires before being subdued by armed officers; then-Premier Mark McGowan called the conduct "a form of terrorism" (contemporary media reporting, May-2022).
The government's response, under Corrective Services Minister Bill Johnston, was to gazette Unit 18, a self-contained unit inside the men's maximum-security Casuarina Prison, as a youth-detention facility in July 2022, to hold the boys Banksia Hill said it could no longer safely manage. It was framed as temporary. Roger Cook became Premier in June 2023 after Mark McGowan's resignation, moving Paul Papalia into the Corrective Services portfolio; both inherited Unit 18 as a going concern and have kept it operating since. In November 2023 the Cook government announced a purpose-built facility would replace it; by the December 2024 mid-year budget review only $11.5 million had been committed to planning and early works; a full $147 million capital commitment did not arrive until 21 November 2025, with practical completion not targeted until 2028 — six years after Unit 18 opened as a "temporary" measure (Western Australian Government, media statements, 30-Nov-2023 and 21-Nov-2025). The government says the total invested in youth-detention reform since mid-2022 — staffing, health services, education and infrastructure combined — is around $268 million (approx.; Western Australian Government, media statement citing Corrective Services Minister Paul Papalia, 2025).
The strongest case
A tiny, acute-needs cohort concentrated in a system built for numbers, not complexity
Some of the government's defence is real, and it deserves to be stated plainly before the criticism that follows. Western Australia is the only state or territory that detains all of its children, across 2.5 million square kilometres, in a single facility, so any crisis at Banksia Hill is, by definition, a statewide one; there is no second site to move children to while the first is repaired. The cohort itself has also changed. The daily average population in WA youth detention has nearly halved over the past decade, from around 143 to about 82 (approx.; Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services, Review of Youth Custody: Follow-up to 2023 Inspection, Part Two, 2024), yet the young people who remain are disproportionately those with the most complex needs: high rates of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, cognitive impairment and trauma that the child-protection and disability systems failed to catch earlier, managed by a custodial workforce that a national staffing shortage makes hard to fill with the specialists those conditions require. The severe overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in this system was not invented by any single WA government; it reflects intergenerational disadvantage that both major parties have failed to close. Nor is the facility's dysfunction new — Banksia Hill rioted under a Liberal-National government in 2013, too. And an independent 2024 inspection did find genuine, measurable progress since the depths of the 2022-23 crisis: more time out of cells, an almost fully resourced medical team, and improved school attendance, evidence that the reform effort has not been wasted (Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services, Review of Youth Custody: Follow-up to 2023 Inspection, Part Two, 2024). None of this excuses what follows. But a government managing a small, shrinking, increasingly acute-needs population, against a national workforce shortage, is not facing a problem that money alone was ever going to solve quickly.
The evidence
The primary record does not dispute the scale of what went wrong, or that it kept going wrong. On 25 August 2022, the Supreme Court of Western Australia declared that confining a child to his cell for more than 20 hours a day, on 26 separate dates across January, February, May and June that year, was unlawful under the Young Offenders Act 1994 (WA) (Supreme Court of WA, Tottle J, 25-Aug-2022). The conduct did not stop. On 11 July 2023, the same judge found three children — two boys and a girl, held across Banksia Hill and Unit 18 — had together spent a combined 167 days in unlawful solitary confinement between September and December 2022, one of them alone for 133 days, and granted an injunction restraining staff from repeating it (Supreme Court of WA, Tottle J, 11-Jul-2023, as reported by the Aboriginal Legal Service of WA). The Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services' first joint inspection of the two facilities, conducted in February 2023, documented the conditions behind those findings: chronic understaffing, damaged infrastructure, and children spending long stretches locked in cells with little access to education, programs or, at times, running water (Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services, Report 148, Inspection of Banksia Hill Detention Centre and Unit 18 at Casuarina Prison, Part One, 2023).
Those unlawful-confinement findings were not the end of it. Cleveland Dodd died in October 2023, the first child to die in the state's custody. Ten months later, in late August 2024, a 17-year-old boy died by suicide in his cell at Banksia Hill after being checked on eleven times by staff overnight — the second such death within a year (Commissioner for Children and Young People WA, media statement, Aug-2024). Aboriginal children have borne this crisis disproportionately: both boys who died were Aboriginal, and Western Australia has consistently recorded the highest rate of Aboriginal overrepresentation in youth detention of any state or territory, though the gap has narrowed from its worst point (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Youth Detention Population in Australia, quarterly series, 2021-2024).
The critique
Context does not excuse conduct a court has twice found unlawful, and it does not explain why a "temporary" adult-prison unit for children stayed open for more than three years, heading toward six by the time its replacement opens. The Supreme Court's second finding, in July 2023, is the most damning fact in this record: it came eleven months after the government had already been told, by the same court, that confining children unlawfully was illegal, and the government did it again, to different children, in a different facility. That is not a system straining under an unforeseen surge in demand. It is a government that was warned, in the clearest terms a court can use, and did not fix the underlying problem before it hurt someone else.
Cleveland Dodd's death followed. The coroner's December 2025 findings did not blame the staff on shift that night; he attributed the death to chronic understaffing "for years" and systemic failure, and recommended a special inquiry into how Unit 18 came to be established as Western Australia's second youth-detention centre at all (Coroner's Court of WA, findings, Dec-2025). A second child died by suicide at Banksia Hill within the year that followed, while the government's own reform programme was already under way. And on 24 November 2025, three days after the Cook government finally announced full funding for Unit 18's replacement, children at Banksia Hill were again on the roof, stripping metal sheeting and throwing projectiles, in a disturbance the responsible minister called "unacceptable" and advocates described as evidence that conditions remained "dangerous, degrading" (contemporary media reporting, Nov-2025). Money announced has not, on this record, translated into a facility that has stopped cycling through crisis.
Unit 18 opened in July 2022 as a temporary fix. Three years, two deaths and two Supreme Court findings of unlawful conduct later, the government's own replacement facility was still years from finished.
The state has not lacked money to draw on. Holding a young person in WA custody cost around $3,124 a day in 2023-24, drawn from a state budget running the largest surpluses in the country (approx.; Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services, submission to the Senate inquiry into Australia's youth justice and incarceration system, Oct-2024). The constraint was never purely fiscal. It was the pace and priority of reform: plans, staffing pipelines and a purpose-built facility that took years to fund in full even as the human cost accumulated in plain view of the state's own courts, inspectors and Commissioner for Children.
Accountability
Fairness requires naming who held responsibility, and when. The May 2022 riot, the decision to gazette Unit 18 inside an adult prison, and the Supreme Court's first unlawful-confinement finding in August 2022 all occurred under Premier Mark McGowan and his Corrective Services Minister, Bill Johnston. Roger Cook became Premier in June 2023, moving Paul Papalia into the Corrective Services portfolio; from that point on, the second Supreme Court finding, both children's deaths, the pace of the new facility's funding, and the November 2025 disturbance all fall within the Cook government's watch. Because WA Labor has governed continuously since 2017, this is not a case of one government inheriting another party's mess: it is one continuous administration that built Unit 18, was told by a court it was acting unlawfully, kept operating it, was told again eleven months later, and only fully funded a replacement in November 2025 — after a second child had already died.
None of this has yet cost the government electorally. Roger Cook led Labor to a third consecutive term in a landslide on 8 March 2025, months after the Cleveland Dodd inquest had opened and while Unit 18 remained open. Cost-of-living pressures, not youth justice, dominated that campaign. A government can retain broad public support while a specific area of policy keeps failing its own legal and moral tests; this masthead applies the second test, not the first.
The risk to the future
A shrinking, more complex cohort, and a "temporary" fix still open six years on
The coroner recommended Unit 18 close "as a matter of urgency." On the government's own timeline, its replacement is not due for practical completion until 2028, subject to market response, meaning a facility a coroner has called dangerous could still be holding children for years after that recommendation was made (Western Australian Government, media statement, 21-Nov-2025; Coroner's Court of WA, findings, Dec-2025). Every month of delay is a month in which the state operates a unit its own coroner says should not exist, holding a cohort whose needs have grown only more concentrated as the wider custodial population has shrunk.
There is a second, harder-to-reverse risk. Two Supreme Court findings of unlawful conduct and two child deaths, both affecting Aboriginal boys in a state with the nation's highest historical rate of Aboriginal overrepresentation in youth detention, cut deep into the trust of the communities most affected by this system — trust that takes years to rebuild and that underpins whether diversion and rehabilitation programs can work at all. A youth-justice system that Aboriginal families do not trust to keep their children alive is a system more likely to produce the reoffending it was built to prevent, compounding the very crisis it was meant to solve.