A prison staffer who found an Indigenous teen with self-inflicted injuries in the youth wing of an adult prison in WA says the unit was “set up to fail”.

April 5, 2024

The corrections worker who found the first juvenile to die in youth detention in Western Australia says the prison unit where the boy self-harmed “was set up to fail” and “unliveable”.

Youth custodial officer Daniel Torrijos discovered Cleveland Dodd unresponsive inside his cell in the youth wing of a high-security adult prison in the early hours of October 12, 2023.

The 16-year-old had made eight threats to self-harm in the hours before Mr Torrijos unlocked his cell door in Unit 18 at Perth’s Casuarina Prison.

Staff tried to save his life before paramedics arrived and took him to hospital, where he died surrounded by his family on October 19.

Mr Torrijos told an inquest on Friday that the prison wasn’t prepared for youth inmates when the unit opened in 2022, and a lot of his colleagues didn’t want to work there because they knew it was “chaos” at the facility.

“It was set up to fail and that’s how it was perceived by a lot of officers,” he said.

“Everyone didn’t feel that positive that it was going to be successful at Unit 18.”

Mr Torrijos said many of the boys at the unit had mental health issues and were in “destructive mode” after being involved in major incidents at Banksia Hill Youth Detention Centre before they were transferred.

“They went in and the place was destroyed,” he said.

“It was set up for adult prisoners, it wasn’t set up for kids who had been wrecking their cells.”

The youth custodial officer, who has 10 years’ experience, painted a bleak picture of WA’s youth justice system, including staff assaults, rolling lockdowns due to staff shortages, limited schooling and riots, in the three years before Cleveland died.

“Chaos … A lot of boys self-harming… It was pretty full-on,” he said of one unit at Banksia Hill.

Some detainees spent so much time in their cells they were able to dismantle walls brick by brick and escape and he believed Unit 18 was selected because the walls were concrete slabs.

“They’d be lucky to get out of a cell for one hour and that’s if we had the staff,” he said.

Mr Torrijos said when he was transferred to Unit 18 it had been destroyed and continued to experience major incidents, including fires and breakouts.

“It was just constant. There was always some sort of incident,” he said.

The cells were “unliveable” and many had wires hanging down, broken windows and plumbing, with no running water or flushing toilets or working showers.

“It was just chaotic … Everything was destroyed,” he said.

Cleveland’s death sparked outrage and grief in the community.

It also triggered an expedited coronial inquest, the first of its kind in WA, to examine the policies and procedures at Unit 18 and Cleveland’s treatment.

Counsel assisting the coroner Anthony Crocker told the inquest during his opening on Wednesday that Cleveland’s death “by apparent suicide” was an “immense tragedy”.

“That this death, the death of a child, occurred … on the grounds of a maximum-security adult male prison, begs the question – how could such a thing happen?” he said.