Johnno Warramarrba
Tragedies go unheard, injustices continue – how many have heard of Johnno Warramarrba?
Gerry Georgatos – August 3rd, 2016
At Don Dale juvenile detention centre a 15-year-old orphaned Aboriginal boy took his life only days after being locked up for $90 worth of ‘crimes’.
How many Australians have heard of Johnno Warramarrba?
Johnno’s mother died when he was a baby. His dad was killed in a car accident when he was eleven. When he committed his less than $90 worth of ‘crimes’ – the stealing of pens and stationary – his grandmother was seriously ill in Darwin Hospital.
This young boy is one of many lives lost in and out of juvenile detention. In general our youth come out of juvenile detention in a worse state than they went in. Hopelessness is all their mind’s eye sees. That which the eye sees and the ear hears is despair and the fears that go with.
For every young life lost, thousands of others meander in broken lives and for many from broken lives to ruination. Johnno Warramarrba was found hanging in his cell. This was February 9, 2000.
He had been arrested in his hometown on Groote Eylandt for stealing goods worth less than $90. There was no counselling and he was not guided by any mentoring. Instead he was journeyed 800 kilometres to Darwin and jailed.
Five days before he was due to be released Johnno killed himself. Because he refused to wash up, a prison officer ordered him to his cell. He was found a little while later, hanging. He died nine hours later at Darwin Hospital.
The penal estate, in line with the criminal justice system, is a culture of punishment. Punishment is dished up in one form or another. Punishment is soaked up till one is broken.
In 2009, an Aboriginal boy aged 12 was arrested and jailed for being in possession of a piece of chocolate – a Freddo frog. He was charged for shoplifting from a Coles supermarket. He was locked up for stealing an item that would have sold for 70 cents.
The kid had no prior convictions. Should we be prosecuting children over 70 cents worth of chocolate?
Western Australia is the mother of jailers of the nation’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. One in 5 of the state’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have been to prison – this is an abomination and not only smacks of but is racialised imprisonment. It is also the world’s highest jailing rate. One in 12 of the state’s Aboriginal adult males are in jail.
Australia has the world’s highest rate of juvenile detention with the mother of all jailers, the United States of America, ranked second behind Australia. The juvenile detention rate gets worse, higher the more west we travel across the Australian continent, with the Northern Territory and Western Australia highest.
Children screaming for help and instead of listening to them we brutalise them; maltreating, abusing, degrading, diminishing, bashing, isolating them. What is with the 23 hour lockdowns? What is with the long-term separations from other detainees, from human contact? What is with hundreds of days consecutive in isolation?
The hurt is deep, damaging. It goes to the psychosocial, destroying prospects of a positive self, robbing one of all hope.
Lost boys and girls – lost children. They are called good for nothing, rotten to the core, dogs. They are queued up, marched, locked up. If we believe in them, they’ll believe in themselves.
There is nothing as profoundly powerful as forgiveness. The forgiveness of others validates self-worth, builds bridges and positive futures. What is missing from the criminal justice system and the penal estate are the cultures of forgiveness and redemption. Forgiveness cultivated and understood keeps families and society solid as opposed to the corrosive anger that diminishes people into the darkest places, into effectively being mental unwell. Anger is a warning sign to becoming unwell. Love comes more natural to the human heart despite that hate can take one over. In the battle between love and hate, one will choose love more easily when in understanding of the endless dark place that is hate and of its corrosive impacts.
Hate can never achieve what love ever so easily can. Hate and anger have filled our prison and juvenile detention centres with the mentally unwell, with the most vulnerable, with the poor – and not with the criminally minded.
Treated as no good they play out in ways they don’t want be, anger follows and the storm is wild.
There is cognitive narrowing but they are not underdeveloped in the neural sense as many rush to claim. Aberrant behaviour is not cognitive impairment but rather cognitive understandings that they are being left behind, left to rot. That’s both neglect and discrimination.
Like so many others, I have worked to turn around the lives of as many people in jail as I possibly could, but for every inmate or former inmate that people like me dedicate time to in order to improve their lot – ultimately there is a tsunami of poverty related issues and draconian laws that flood ‘offenders’ into prisons. Jailing the poorest, most vulnerable, the mentally unwell, those lost in the aberrant, in my experience only serves to elevate the risk of reoffending, of normalising disordered and broken lives of digging deeper divides between people, of marginalising people. It has been my experience that in general people come out of prison worse than when they went in.
Australia jails and punishes like there’s no tomorrow.
Johnno Warramarrba lived below the poverty line – in extreme poverty. He just wanted to go to school.
Nearly 100 per cent of children in juvenile detention, and nearly 100 per cent of adult prisoners live below the poverty line.
Juvenile detention centres and adult prisons are firmaments of institutional racism and classism.
Johnno Warramarrba’s mother died when he was a baby. His dad was killed in a car accident when he was eleven. When he committed his less than $90 worth of ‘crimes’ – the stealing of pens and stationary – his grandmother was seriously ill in Darwin Hospital. The boy came from Groote Eylandt. It’s an island of three communities. It is a closed island where permission is required to visit. The impoverishment of the people is stark despite the high cultural content. Only three students have ever graduated high school.
But on Groote Eylandt there is the GEMCO manganese mine – one of the richest such projects in the world. The FIFOs have it well – I stayed where they do in Anungu however it is a different story for the rest of the island. Talk about Native Title failing a community. In general, Native Title is a longstanding debacle as a holistic compensatory mechanism. I spent time on Groote Eylandt in responding to the suicide related trauma of a family who lost their 13 year old daughter. The island community had a resident counsellor predominately for the FIFOs but no resident counsellors for the locals.
The degradation of homeland communities across northern and western Australia is the work of one government after another, who are responsible either in stripping social infrastructure and assets from these communities or who have denied the equivalency of services and opportunities to these communities when compared to non-Aboriginal communities.
It was reported that in the week after Johnno’s suicide, that a 22-year-old Groote Eylandt man was sentenced to jail for a Christmas Day ‘crime’ in 1998. He was found guilty of stealing biscuits and cordial from the GEMCO storeroom. Jamie Wurramara was jailed for a so-called crime, $23.
The public outcries come and go and are forgotten, but the broken and ruined lives mount. The toll is becoming insurmountable – an abomination.
One in four of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander males have been to prison. The suicides are increasing, the number of people jailed increasing.
Institutional racism and classism makes deaf and blind the nation but somehow if today’s children and tomorrow’s unborn are to share in hope the nation’s eyes and ears need lending to.
The Case to End Mandatory Sentencing
If there’s one wedge holding open the Incarceration Gap, it’s mandatory sentencing.
Eliza Graves-Browne – Feb 10 2016, 11:00am
VICE NEWS
Today, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will table the annual Close the Gap report in Parliament, which charts the progress of the 10-year long campaign to match the health and life expectancy of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with non-Indigenous Australians.
The report looks at a key areas like life expectancy, education and health. But then there’s the incarceration gap—the fact that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are massively overrepresented in our jails. It was an issue VICE dove into last year with our Incarceration Issue: Indigenous Australians make up around three percent of the general Australian population, but 26 percent of our prison population.
Since 2014, there have been calls for the Close the Gap campaign to set “justice targets”, aimed at tackling the incarceration gap. In December, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda advocated for these targets, calling “the shameful rates of imprisonment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples a major barrier to closing the health and life expectancy gap in this generation.” As the ABC have it, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten will today join Gooda in asking the government to redouble their efforts to reduce Indigenous imprisonment rates.
If there’s one wedge holding open the incarceration gap, it’s mandatory sentencing. This refers to minimum penalties and imprisonment sentences which must be applied to certain crimes, irrespective of the severity of the offence. The scheme limits judicial discretion by prohibiting the court from considering impeding circumstances, such as mental illness, impoverishment or addiction.In 2014, the Northern Territory and Western Australia ignored calls from the United Nations to abolish the policies. Last year Amnesty International called on the federal government to override the laws. So far, no changes have been made.
The last time Australia had a serious discussion about mandatory sentencing was over fifteen years ago. On 9 February 2000, a 15-year-old Aboriginal boy named Johnno Wurramarrba was found hanging in his room at Don Dale Juvenile Centre with a bedsheet wrapped around his neck. He had committed suicide after being sentenced to 28 days imprisonment for stealing some felt tip pens, pencils, liquid paper, oil and paint worth less than $90. This petty theft was classed as a property offence, a crime serious enough to fall under mandatory sentencing laws.
Johnno was raised in Groote Eylandt, an island just off the Northern Territory mainland, known for its prosperous mines and stark socioeconomic inequality. His mother died when he was two, followed by his father when he was 11. Those who knew Johnno described him as a “lonely, neglected boy” that cycled through the local Indigenous community with no long-term home or carer. Just before his trial, Johnno’s aunt—who he called “mother”—also passed away.
Johnno told staff at Don Dale that he didn’t want to return to Groote Eylandt.
“I want to be with my grandmother,” he said. She was living in Darwin, receiving kidney dialysis treatment. This was clearly a young man grappling with mental health issues—he complained of hearing voices, powerful headaches, and even made suicidal threats. Staff also knew he was going through withdrawals from serious marijuana and petrol sniffing habits. In spite of all of this, Johnno was declared healthy, and advised to take Panadol.
Johnno did not understand why he was being detained. He asked why he wasn’t receiving a bond or community service order, to which his lawyer responded, “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
This case is just one of hundreds: Another 15-year-old Aboriginal boy attempted suicide during incarceration in 2001 after being jailed for breaking a window; an 18-year-old Aboriginal man jailed for 14 days for stealing a $2.50 cigarette lighter; an 18-year-old Aboriginal man jailed 90 days for stealing 90 cents; and a homeless man was sentenced 12 months for stealing a towel from a clothes line.
Western Australia, currently treating juveniles as young as 10 without exception from the scheme, has had similar results. In 2005, a 15-year-old orphaned Indigenous boy was caught stealing an ice cream worth $2. Even though he confessed when approached by staff, and returned the ice cream uneaten, police spent $10,000 transporting him more than 1,500 kilometers from his community to Perth. He spent 12 days in detainment before being placed on a 12 month conditional release order under the “three strike” burglary minimums.
Why don’t we hear about the 13-year-old boy sentenced 12 months in juvenile detention for sneaking into unlocked hotel rooms and stealing confectionary? Or the intellectually disabled and homeless 18-year-old girl being given a $12,000 fine or equivalent jail time for breaching a move on notice?
Since Johnno’s death in 2001, public debate surrounding the mandatory sentencing regime has disappeared almost completely. The laws were repealed that year, only to be implemented for violent offences in 2008 after public demand for harsher penalties. In 2013, the minimums were expanded by the Liberal Country Party to “correct the failed attempt by the former Labor Government.”
The changes were part of a “Crackdown on Crime” campaign, which ran as alternatives to jail, such as the Drug and Alcohol Court and SMART court, had their funding cut. All other Australian jurisdictions have also strengthened their mandatory laws in recent years. These changes came after reports showing the prior failure in the Northern Territory, contributing to Indigenous over-representation and lack of measurable impact on deterrence.
State governments are continuing to expand mandatory sentencing laws in the hope of gaining the populist vote. Most worrying is that decisions are based on community concerns that often evolve out of misinformed or biased media hypes. While there is a prominent public view that judges are too lenient, a 2011 parliamentary paper argues that mass media is the primary source of information regarding the justice system and when fully informed, 90 percent agree with the judge’s decisions. This misperception enables the law to become a politicised tool that violates the very notion of justice.
“Western Australia is imprisoning Aboriginal males at the world’s highest rate,” says Gerry Georgatos, a leading academic in custodial reform and a community consultant on Indigenous suicide. “One in 13 of the state’s Aboriginal adult males are in prison. It’s racialised imprisonment, an abomination – moral, political and otherwise.”
Georgatos argues that mandatory sentencing doesn’t rehabilitate perpetrators or reduce recidivism. “Mandatory sentencing viciously reduces individuals to as if they are near worthless. If they feel like this then it will be played out with dangerous behaviour,” he says. “[The law] has no intention to assist the offender but to damage them, beat and break them.”
Few Indigenous inmates have finished year 12, prison reform expert says
If there’s one wedge holding open the Incarceration Gap, it’s mandatory sentencing.
Helen Davidson in Darwin
THE GUARDIAN – 6 Jul 2017
The Don Dale youth detention centre in Darwin. The rates of high-school completion are low among all Australian prisoners, but are even lower among Indigenous people. Photograph: Jonny Weeks for the Guardian
Almost no Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners have completed year 12, a leading researcher has said, calling for an overhaul of education inside correctional facilities.
The Northern Territory has launched an Aboriginal justice unit, tasked with leading “a total cultural shift” within the NT justice system and creating a formal justice agreement with Indigenous communities.
Gerry Georgatos, a restorative justice and prison reform expert, told Guardian Australia reform was “on the horizon” but governments needed to commit to providing the same level of education for inmates as was available on the outside.
The rates of high-school completion are low among all Australian prisoners, but are even lower among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – who are already vastly overrepresented in jails. Georgatos, who works closely with prisoners across Australian facilities, said in his experience close to 100% of Indigenous inmates had not finished year 12.
“I visited one Perth-based prison in WA and spoke to 15 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners who were nearing release in the next four to 12 weeks,” Georgatos said. “All 15 had not completed year 12, and half had not been to high school. Half a dozen had significant literacy issues.”
A 2015 study by the Australian Institute for Health and Welfare found only 38% of prison entrants surveyed had attained year 11 or 12. Just 20% of Indigenous entrants had completed the same level of education, and Indigenous dischargees – outside of New South Wales – were more than twice as likely as non-Indigenous counterparts to have only reached year 8 or below.
Studies have linked education with reduced rates of recidivism, a social return Georgatos suggested, alongside increased post-release employment, would offset the cost of increased educational programs.
“The way forward is to get people as many qualifications as they possibly can, and that starts with completing primary school and completing high school if they’re in juvenile detention,” said Georgatos.
Georgatos said his concerns applied equally to juvenile and adult incarceration, and the systems needed a “radical” overhaul.
“Conversations and policy making at the government level are substantive, but they need to be much more substantive. It must be the equivalent to what’s on the outside.”
Earlier this year the royal commission into the protection and detention of children heard from teachers and managers at Northern Territory juvenile detention centre schools.
All noted that the transitional nature of the detention population made determining and providing individual lesson plans difficult, and the large proportion of children who were on remand also made it “an uncertain time”.
“We don’t know whether they’re fit for school or if they’re able to function properly in the classroom. We don’t know their literacy or numeracy academic levels so we need to assess them as soon as possible,” said David Glyde, a teacher at Alice Springs detention centre.
Georgatos said that didn’t matter. “In that window of time while they’re in juvenile detention, no matter how short or long, what’s on offer on the outside should be on the inside,” he said. “That way we have a minimisation of disruption to educational content.”
Georgatos’s call for educational investment coincided with territory’s official launch of an Aboriginal justice unit within the Attorney General’s Department.
The six-member unit is tasked with spending the next year consulting on incarceration and other justice issues with Indigenous groups and communities in order to create an Aboriginal justice agreement.
More than 85% of the NT’s prison population identify as Indigenous.
The NT attorney general, Natasha Fyles, promised the unit would look at “practical solutions” and empower communities as part of the government’s pledge to return decision-making powers to Indigenous people.
“We would like to see a justice system that acknowledges Aboriginal Territorians, acknowledges culture, acknowledges language, and provides for that in delivering a fair equitable justice system for all Territorians.”
Fyles said the unit would examine in-depth, long-term measures, including what was offered within correctional facilities, alternatives to prison, and support for people on remand.
Asked about calls to scrap mandatory sentencing, Fyles said it would be “looked at” by the government.
The director of the unit, Leanne Liddle, said its establishment showed “a total shift of culture of the government”.
She said reducing recidivism and incarceration rates were just part of the unit’s goals.
“We want to embrace Aboriginal people’s leadership styles, we want to make sure that Aboriginal people are heard, that there is local decision-making, and embed that all within a culturally competent framework in the justice agreement.”
She said Indigenous leadership in communities was strong and “they want this change to happen”.
“They want safer communities.”
She said it couldn’t be looked at as a justice issue alone, and the unit would work across departments, including health and housing.
Sam Bowden, a spokeswoman for the Making Justice Work campaign, welcomed the announcement, which responded to one of the organisation’s six pre-election “asks”.
Bowden said the challenge for the government would be to back it up with thorough consultations “and by creating a culture … where conversations about how the justice system and Aboriginal people interact can happen.”