There were dozens of opportunities to save 16-year-old Cleveland Dodd in the years before his suicide in youth detention, and many more in the immediate lead-up. Yet the WA government failed to act, writes Keane Bourke. WARNING: This story discusses incidents of self-harm and the image of an Indigenous person who has died.
For the last three weeks, the WA government has been trying to convince you what happened inside Unit 18 on the night Cleveland Dodd died was an array of things.
Mere hours after Cleveland had been resuscitated, Corrective Services Minister Paul Papalia confidently praised the actions of the guards who responded."The boy had contacted officers via the intercom. It was only a matter of minutes from that moment until he was checked and found to be unresponsive and the officers commenced resuscitation," was the minister's version of events.
Guards might have swung into action sooner if they had removed the piece of toilet paper covering the camera in Cleveland's cell and were able to monitor him in real-time. A system that meant individual and seemingly innocuous errors on the night — which appear to have been habitual shortcuts made by those trying to work in that broken system — added up to disaster.
It was an entirely foreseeable consequence of those gaps slowly getting bigger over time, until one was large enough for Cleveland to slip right through, undetected for at least 10 minutes.Casuarina Prison is the main maximum security prison for adult males in Perth, and houses the Unit 18 youth wing.