Northern Territory juvenile justice often hired the wrong people and poorly prepared them to deal with a daily “crisis situation”, the former corrections commissioner has told the royal commission.
However, Ken Middlebrook also defended his years overseeing the crisis-plagued juvenile sector, saying he was unaware of the behaviour of guards such as Conan Zamolo, who filmed himself making a detainee eat bird faeces.
Between 2012 and late 2015, when he was forced to resign after a run of custodial escapes including by a convicted axe murderer erroneously placed on a work camp, Middlebrook oversaw dozens of high-profile incidents inside juvenile detention, including the 2014 teargassing of teenage detainees.
“Sometimes we had the wrong people in the job,” he said, but there was little choice because they needed staff on the ground quickly.
Middlebrook conceded his managers were extremely stressed during that period and “we didn’t prepare people well to proceed into those roles”.
“Whether it was right or wrong we were responding to that destructive and disruptive behaviour time and time again” but fixing problems often created new ones because of the limited funds, he said.
“It was a crisis situation which just occurred every day and we couldn’t seem to get in front of.”
He said his “lightbulb moment” was seeing the level of violence a young person inflicted on a youth justice officer who opened the door to give the detainee a Panadol.
“These kids were actually intimidating youth justice officers and we hadn’t trained them to deal with that,” he said.
He said managers never told him they needed more staff to deal with the number of children being put in the BMU isolation cells.
Middlebrook also said he was unaware of Zamolo forcing detainees to eat bird faeces, until he heard the allegation at a youth justice conference. At the time he felt he had been set up by lawyers from the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (Naaja) and the ABC but now accepted he should have said he would investigate it.
“How can I act on it if I didn’t know about it?” he said. “If I had any knowledge or inkling that was the sort of behaviour which went on, I wouldn’t have accepted it and I would have made professional standards look at that.”
He agreed his lack of knowledge of a since proved incident “indicates there has been a dramatic systems failure” and reflected a culture inside the centre.
He said he grew to have concerns about “the sort of muscle-bound type officers that were starting to be attracted into youth justice”.
Middlebrook said he was “embarrassed” to be leading a system that locked people up at one of the highest rates in the world and showed a graph of incarceration rates rising at a rate eclipsing population growth. He suggested it correlated with the beginning of the NT intervention and an increase in police officers and stations in Indigenous communities.
“If there had been community corrections officers or housing for community corrections officers in those communities where there were police stations, we might have made a difference,” he said.
Middlebrook said he had showed the graph to both Labor minister Gerry McCarthy and his successor, John Elferink, “on a regular basis” to show them the result of their focus on law and order and mandatory sentencing.
But “quite often I would get back ‘Mr and Mrs Malak expect this’. You can only do so much in trying to influence government policy,” he said. “I think most politicians live in a four-year cycle and they’re thinking about being re-elected again and they want to be popular in the community.”
Middlebrook said McCarthy had a “genuine interest in trying to change infrastructure, to do infrastructure improvements, including the juveniles.
“The difference I think of the two ministers that I worked for is that minister McCarthy had a lot of the support from his chief minister and his treasurer. Where I don’t believe from where I was observing that my former minister [Elferink] had the same level of support to try and do those changes within the system.
“At the end of the day, we were an organisation that was struggling for money, struggling for resources.”
In the 2014/15 financial year, the corrections department was asked to find savings of $13-15m.
“That really brings you to your knees,” he said.
Middlebrook sought to “tap into” the CLP’s $30m funding allocation to a new alcohol mandatory treatment centre but was unsuccessful. The new government also “made it pretty clear” a secure mental health facility built into the new adult jail would not be funded for operation.
He said he had a number of conversations with Elferink about funding requirements but, when he estimated about $12m was needed, Elferink said “dude, you’re not going to get that” because there was no way cabinet would support it.
Middlebrook was also questioned on how he responded to increasing drug use among detainees.
While he was confident it had led to a lot of behavioural issues, Middlebrook was unaware of any exploration of testing or detox programs.
“Probably in hindsight that would have been appropriate,” he said. “There are a lot of things in hindsight I’ve thought about since 2015 when I finished that I probably could have done differently.”
He also expressed regret over the way a casual employee accused of assault was handled in 2010. Harold Morgan was not stood down at the time and an internal investigation by the professional standards unit was cancelled when police launched their own.
Middlebrook said a full-time employee would likely have been suspended for the period of the investigation.
“It’s difficult to actually get staff to fill the post and I thought that, by just terminating that position, that he was gone.”
The commission continues.
