Juvenile detainees were made to pay “rent” to guards and forced to defecate into pillowcases when they weren’t allowed to go to the toilet at night, the Northern Territory royal commission has been told by teenager Dylan Voller.
Voller, the detainee seen strapped in a restraint chair on ABC’s Four Corners, also said he was denied toilet breaks when he was transferred at short notice from Alice Springs to Darwin and taken the 1,500km journey in the back of a police vehicle with no air conditioning.
Lawyers representing other parties, including the Northern Territory government, had again sought to restrict part of Voller’s testimony being published and for the commissioners to make clear Voller was only telling his version of events. He is the first detainee to testify, following a number of expert witnesses.
Voller introduced his criminal history to a closed courtroom in Darwin on Monday, including a long list of “serious offences” to which he had pleaded guilty.
“I’m definitely not proud of it,” he said. “It’s humiliating and has a lot of mistakes that were made. I’m sorry for it but I’ve done it already.”
The now 19 year old made multiple fresh allegations of mistreatment against him by guards and described the condition of his detention in multiple NT facilities, including both Don Dale centres.
Voller alleged guards charged detainees “rent” for staying at Don Dale, taking $1.5o a day from money the detainees had earned through good behaviour.
He also said he was forced to defecate into a pillowcase after guards at the Alice Springs juvenile facility refused to let him out of his cell to go to the toilet during the night. He said detainees would repeatedly be forced to urinate through the cell bars.
He was first strip-searched at about the age of 11 or 12, he said, and it would occur every time he was moved between facilities or in and out of isolation cells, or when he coming back from the bathroom because he had been throwing toilet paper at cameras to cover the screen.
Voller also alleged officers repeatedly stripped him of clothes and bedding for hours as a form of punishment, and denied him food and water.
One youth justice officer at Alice Springs noticed he was hungry in the middle of one night and threw muesli bars and fruit through to his cell, Voller said.
“He didn’t agree with what they did by starving me, I guess.”
Voller also described the process of transferring detainees between facilities often without warning.
“If you were lucky you can get one last visit with your family,” he said.
In one instance he was sent from Alice Springs to Darwin, despite his psychologist recommending against it. He said he was handcuffed in the back of a police vehicle for the two-day, 1,500km road journey and forced to urinate through the back of the cage.
“I started threatening self-harm because I was hoping, if I were at risk, they wouldn’t continue to drive,” he said. “I started choking myself with the seatbelt, stuff like that.”
He described “two good officers” who accompanied him from Tennant Creek to Darwin and let him sit at the side of the car with the door open at rest stops, and would buy him cold drinks and talk to him during the journey.
He also had positive experiences with a one-on-one tutor and three individual caseworkers who “made the effort to talk to us, contact our families, ask us ‘is everything all right with you and the guards?’”.
But most didn’t make an effort to help keep his family relationship strong, he said.
“One caseworker was saying my family didn’t really care about me and stuff like that,” he said. “For a while I started believing it, I guess.”
Voller and his sister were put into foster care at about the age of 14, where he lived with older boys and they smoked marijuana and committed criminal acts.
He received his last proper schooling when he was about 10 years old and had wanted to complete year 10 while in detention but wasn’t allowed to. He told the commission as a child he wasn’t allowed to attend school unless he took his ADHD medication but the medication made him sick.
Voller’s family has campaigned for his release. Applications for parole, which he has been eligible for since last year, have been knocked back. Last week his mother said Voller was fearful of reprisals by guards inside the adult jail where he is currently serving a three-year sentence.
The hearing, including Voller’s testimony and those who are responding to his allegations, continues in Darwin.
