A "gladiator pit", a "war zone", a "kindergarten for the adult prison" — these are just some of the ways Tasmania's only youth detention centre has been described.
This is what it's like inside.
Images and video of young people in this story are recreations.
It is the middle of the day and 17-year-old Oliver* has used the few hours he has out of his room in the Ashley Youth Detention Centre to call his mum.
With staff shortages still plaguing the centre in Tasmania's north, Oliver and his fellow detainees are spending up to 23 hours a day locked in a small room.
When they are let out, it is in one-hour blocks.
Oliver tells his mum he doesn't bother getting up till 10am now. If he gets up at 7am it just makes the day — and the time he spends in his room — longer.
"It drives you crazy sometimes … you're in a tiny room with a toilet, shower and bed and a TV."
Oliver is enthusiastic about the Nintendo Switches they are given to kill time, but he says they don't get them until 6pm.
He says the boredom is driving the detainees crazy.
"There's been mad riots lately, some of the boys are going insane because they're just locked down. On Thursday night or Friday there was a big riot."
"All the big boys jumped on the workers, tried to take their keys and radio. Then they ran outside and tried to jump the big fence."
Oliver, who has been diagnosed as having learning difficulties, says he spends about three hours outside of his room each day.
When he first arrived, he says he spent more than 35 days in a row just getting an hour out of his small room.
"There's only been two or three weeks out of the four months I've been here where I've actually had some normal days."
Ashley, which holds youth detainees aged between 10 and 18, is meant to be a place of rehabilitation.
Instead, it has been described as the "kindergarten of Risdon", Tasmania's adult prison.
Rather than helping detainees turn their lives around, Ashley has not even been giving kids proper access to school.
The frequent lockdowns — due to staff shortages — make that difficult.
"It definitely doesn't help," Oliver says.
"Half of them just talk about committing more crimes and shit. Half just sitting here planning what they're gonna do when they get out."
"[There are] no programs, no-one to see in here to help."
Oliver wants to see more programs and counselling, but like other detainees, he talks about Risdon as though it may be part of his future.
His mum Naomi* even remembers him talking about how the canteen at Risdon is supposed to be better.
"I'm so frightened that next year when my son turns 18, he will end up there [in Risdon] if something huge doesn't change," she says.
"They're just so institutionalised, there's no future for them. They think about what they're going to do when they get out, which will be to reoffend.
"I just think it's ruining him."
Naomi believes rather than helping her son, Ashley is just setting him up to reoffend.
"His teenage years are being wasted spending time in there with absolutely no help whatsoever," she says.
"The lockdowns have been so huge that now these boys, including my son, are angry, frustrated and living in isolation.
"There's no therapeutic help. There's no counselling, no therapies, nothing."
Naomi has had her own issues with the centre. She recounts a time when Oliver was taken to hospital after complaining of heart issues.
Ashley never told her. Instead, she found out the following morning when a paediatrician at the Launceston General Hospital called her to give her an update.
"I was just horrified that nobody had bothered to contact me," she says.
"I was angry … I think my son's at Ashley, that he's safe where he is, but he's actually got heart issues and no one from that centre has let me know."
She is looking forward to the day Oliver gets out, but fears what will happen next.
"He's getting to an age where it's going to be too late if we don't do something now," she says.
'It made me worse'
On the other side of the country, Luke* is safely tucked away at home.
He is drowsy when he picks up the phone to talk about his time at Ashley, having just woken up from a nap.
Luke spends a lot of time sleeping these days and rarely leaves the house. He says it is a hangover from his time in youth detention at Ashley.
"It probably made me worse as a criminal to be honest … [I'm] just angry, never go out in public and just sit at home.
"I've tried to get jobs and stuff like that, but it's just the anxiety."
Luke has been in and out of Ashley since he was 13.
He's 18 now and has not set foot in the centre for about 18 months — but he still dreams about it.
"I wake up during the night. Sometimes, I just look at something and it reminds me of Ashley, the smell reminds me of Ashley."
Luke did not experience the lockdowns Oliver has, but understands how he feels.
This is Ashley.
It's surrounded by farmland a short drive outside of Deloraine.
If you look it up on Google Maps, it's labelled as a 'school'
It opened in 1922 as a home for boys, with the idea to reform young offenders by putting them to work on the farm.
It became a youth detention centre in 1999 and is finally set to close by the end of 2024.
Ashley works on a colour-coded behaviour system where privileges are given or taken away based on behaviour — the current colours are red, green, yellow or orange.
When Luke was at Ashley, there was also 'blue', which saw detainees locked in their rooms for hours on end.
The program is no longer in operation.
"It's worse than f**king maximum security in Risdon prison," he says.
"You get like two sandwiches a day, 23 hours in your cell, one hour out and 10 minutes for a phone call every day, an hour of TV time in your room and that's if they're being nice."
"You're not allowed outside ever. When you go to exercise you're only allowed in the inside gym. So you don't even get to feel fresh air."
Luke says he was only ever kept on blue for a few days at a time. But he says rather than helping, it just made him angry.
"Just imagine looking at four walls, f**king 24 hours a day."
Like many before him, Luke has heard the conditions are better at the state's adult prison.
"From what I've been told by my friends who've been to prison, they'd rather go to Risdon than Ashley," he says.
Luke speaks about the verbal abuse he endured in Ashley from the guards, remembering how they would "mouth off" about him and his family, calling him a "little criminal" and making him feel "little".
"Every time you get back to your unit, every time you're walking across the yard, they're saying something to ya. It's just a normal thing for them," he says.
"[One guard said] 'I'll make you look like an owl'.
"It means they'll cave your face in."
The abuse wasn't just verbal.
Luke says he was forcefully strip-searched on a number of occasions.
He describes a time when he had a cigarette lighter hidden on him and was dragged past all the other units, while half-dressed.
"They dragged me up to admissions, my undies were half falling down and pretty much seeing all my private parts.
"All the units could kind of see me so I was walked in front of everyone ass-naked, pretty much, my d**k was pretty much hanging out.
"I was embarrassed as f**k. I was probably like 16, 15 or something."
Detainees suing over alleged abuse
Ashley Youth Detention Centre has spent the better part of 2022 in the headlines.
Along with the rolling lockdowns, more than 100 former detainees have launched a class action against the state in the Supreme Court, alleging abuse at the hands of the institution.
Meanwhile, the Commission of Inquiry into the Tasmanian Government's Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Institutional Settings has given voice to allegations of invasive strip searches, beatings, sexual abuse, shredded documents, altered reports and gang rapes.
As has been pointed out, none of this was news to the Tasmanian government.
Reports dating back two decades raise concerns about property damage, a high level of absenteeism, underqualified staff and a system that tends to punish rather than rehabilitate.
In November 2022, a United Nations subcommittee for the prevention of torture said it had serious concerns about the practice of keeping children in solitary confinement, naming Ashley alongside Don Dale in the Northern Territory and Western Australia's Banksia Hill.
As of Friday, 2 December 2022 in AYDC there are 11 young people in total, five sentenced and six on remand — meaning they have not yet been convicted of a crime.
Tasmanians pay around $10.5 million a year to keep the facility open.
The Tasmanian government has committed to closing the centre by the end of 2024 and recently released plans to build five new facilities with a preventative rather than punishment focus.
It will give them the ability to separate detainees based on age, the nature of their crimes, and those who are on bail.
But still, there are calls to shut down Ashley immediately.
'Set up to fail'
Alysha is one of those who has led the call to close the centre as soon as possible.
She started working at Ashley as a clinical practice consultant in October 2019, but has been on leave since April 2020. She still remembers her first impression of the place.
"It's very sterile and cold. It's scary … if I was a child arriving there for the first time, I just can't imagine how terrifying that would be."
Alysha says she was immediately alarmed by the way the staff treated the children.
"How they would speak to them, how they would refer to them when they weren't present, how they would interact with them … [there was] a complete lack of respect towards the young people in our care."
While Ashley claims to aim to be therapeutic, Alysha doesn't believe the will is there.
She was brought in for that purpose, but felt like her role was almost "tokenistic" or "political".
"I felt like I was almost set up to fail … none of the groundwork or support was put in place to make sure the role could be successful.
"In fact, I had my manager tell me that he felt clinical supervision was a f**ing waste of time in my first week on site.
"It was a real shame, it was a huge missed opportunity."
Alysha only spent six months at Ashley in the end.
In that time she claims she was bullied and sexually harassed and witnessed behaviour towards the children that seriously concerned her.
She also reported multiple allegations of sexual assault against the children.
After Alysha left, she spoke out about her concerns and had a meeting with then-premier Peter Gutwein who soon after announced it would close within three years.
That was September 2021 — and while the government says the centre is still on track to close at the end of 2024, that doesn't guarantee all five facilities will be built.
Alysha is not the first worker to come forward with concerns about the facility.
'Gee, these are kids'
Former youth detention worker Leigh McQueeney spoke to a Tasmanian parliamentary committee back in 2007.
It has now been more than 20 years since he has been inside Ashley — but from what he has heard, little has changed.
"I remember when I went to apply for the position, they took me into the centre and all I saw was just really struggling young people," he says.
"They had the same posters on the walls as my kids had — artists, fast cars and so forth.
"I thought 'gee, these are kids'
"You could see that there was no provision for them at all."
It was the year 2000. Ashley had only just been converted from a boys home to a youth detention centre.
It was also operating over two sites — the facility in Deloraine in the state's north, which had been damaged in a fire, and a temporary set-up in the Ron Barwick wing of Risdon Prison in the state's south.
Mr McQueeney was based in the south.
"[The] young people were locked in their cells, and they were adult cells from 7pm until around 8am in the morning … it was a bit harsh."
He took on the role, on the basis "something needed to be done". Many of the kids, he recalls, were wards of the state.
"They were failed in the child protection system, and then they moved to youth justice," he says.
"These are not young people who had lovely comfortable family homes and who decided to become criminals.
"These are young people with very traumatic childhoods … on a path where mainstream schooling didn't work for them, their experiences of life were nothing like the other students and their teachers.
"There was usually serious neglect, some of them had some cognitive impairment, but most of them were pretty smart.
"Some of them are incredibly intelligent, and really should have had far better trajectories, but of course, then you've got no foundation of quality family life."
He believes "the miracle" would have been showing the detainees that life can be different, but he says many have no understanding of it.
"I remember teaching a 16-year-old, very intelligent, who had around grade 2 or 3 level reading experience … and he had no comprehension that the storybook was around a family going on holiday.
"That was completely foreign to him. He'd never been on a holiday with his family, he just couldn't comprehend.
When the repairs to the Deloraine facility were completed, Mr McQueeney and his colleagues were asked to move. But he never made his way north — instead, he switched careers and became a nurse.
Ashley, he says, was a place of inaction that alienates positive people — there was no way he could stay.
"People that we did have [in Ashley] go on to commit appalling crimes as adults because there's been no protective net, no positive outcome.
"I can't imagine they'd have a more positive outcome in prison, which is really tragic. So heartbreaking.
"This is how you end up with this awful situation where you find out for years people have been [raising concerns] and nothing has been done."
'I'm wasting my life'
Like Mr McQueeney, Luke is now far away from Ashley, but he is struggling to move on with his life.
"Everything that's kinda happened to me I block it out, but I look at something small and it reminds me of it," he says.
"I just sit around all day doing f**k all. I'm just wasting my life at the moment."
He doesn't know what he's going to do with his future, but when asked where he might be if he'd never gone to Ashley, he's quick to answer.
"Either an Australian soccer player or probably working with my mum," he says.
"I'd probably be doing real well for myself."
The ABC spoke to current and former Ashley detainees for this story, but youth detainees in Tasmania cannot be identified.
Their names have been changed and images and video of young people in this story are recreations.
The ABC last filmed inside Ashley more than a decade ago. Some of this archival footage has been used.
Requests to film inside the detention centre for this story were denied.
This year, the department provided a select few images of the inside of the centre.
Since speaking to the ABC, Oliver's mum Naomi says things have improved and he is spending more time outside his room — but she says he still does not have access to schooling due to staff shortages.
In a statement to the ABC, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, Children and Young People said that during periods when there was not enough staff, young people may spend longer periods of time in their bedrooms.
She claimed that during these periods, young people had access to schooling, appointments, phone calls and exercise, as well as education packs, video games, music and movies.
The ABC understands young people do not have access to phone calls in their rooms, and the video games are only available after 6pm.
In August, the then-acting principal of the Ashley School, Sam Baker, told the commission of inquiry that Ashley has been under restricted practice this year, and when that occurs, the school cannot operate.
Instead, staff spend one-on-one time with the young people for about an hour a day, but young people often prioritise other things, such as phone calls to family.
The department also said it was working to recruit more staff — seven staff from the Northern Territory started in October, and another nine staff will start this week.
It said the "Blue Program", referred to by Luke, had not been in operation for several years and was "never formally endorsed by the department".
*Names have been changed
Credits
- Reporting: Lucy MacDonald
- Photography/video: Maren Preuss and Luke Bowden
- Graphics/video editing: Paul Strk
- Digital producer: James Dunlevie
- Digital editor: Daniel Miller
