New Darwin prison holds troubled youth 'in good stead'

Almost eight years after the nation was rocked by images of child inmate in a spithood and restrained to a metal chair, a new youth detention centre has been unveiled in Darwin.

Youth crime continues to monopolise the looming Northern Territory election, but Chief Minister Eva Lawler says the $130 million "purpose-built" facility is Labor's "common sense solution" to the issue.

Hampered by delays and a $60 million budget blowout, Ms Lawler said the new facility will not be operational till October.

The 44-bed facility sits metres from the Darwin Adult Correctional Centre and boasts "work-readiness" training facilities alongside a school, health clinic and "state-of-the-art security features".

It also has a three-by-two metre room with padded walls that the government called a "low-stimulation room", despite the Aboriginal deaths in custody royal commission recommending padded cells ceased being used for at-risk people in custodial settings nearly 32 years ago.

"This facility will hold the Northern Territory in good stead for our young people into the future," Ms Lawler said.

"The young people that come here will be on a pathway to turn their lives around and to improve their lives, to get an education, to get training and to not find themselves having to come back to this facility."

In 2022, the Department of Territory Families released a new therapeutic model of care it said all territory youth prisons would operate under.

Up to 75 per cent of young people in the youth justice system are reported to have one or more psychiatric disorder, the model's document stated.

Other behavioural disorders are widespread, it said, with most young people expected to have at least one neuro-developmental impairment.

Currently the NT has five youth mental health beds, and Territory Families chief executive Emma White said young people had been key to the facility's design.

"The young people that came here last week were high-fiving each other and cheering, they couldn't really believe the difference," she said.

That is because Territory children have been kept in a "dog box" for decades, says youth justice advocate Natalie Hunter, grandmother to a young person in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre where the child was pictured restrained and in a spithood.

"Of course they are going to think that is great, they have been kept in a dog box, worse than a dog box forever and day," she said.

"Our young people don't need detention they need to be with family and on country, learning from our elders and given a chance at the future they want."

The National Ban Spithood Coalition said children need to be liberated from torture and punishment.

"We demand that children be granted access to supports required to foster positive long-term social and emotional wellbeing, not be hidden in the prisons that facilitate the very types of restraints and mechanisms that have shown lifelong trauma," the group said.

"We stand against the opening of any centre that would facilitate child abuse and degradation, as NT child prisons have been shown to do."

The Labor government is continuing to implement the recommendations of the royal commission by raising the age of criminal responsibility and closing Don Dale, Ms Lawler said.

However, the recommendation to raise the age to 12 also asked the NT government to ensure children under 14 were only detained for "serious crimes".

In 2024 up to 36 children have entered detention under the age of 14.

The Royal Commission into Child Protection and Youth Detention recommended Don Dale be closed in February 2018, but once the children are moved to the new facility it will become an adult prison again.

Berrimah Prison, as it once was called, was decommissioned by then corrections commissioner Ken Middlebrook in 2014 when he said the facility "was only fit for a bulldozer".

For a decade, children as young as 10 were housed by the Country Liberal and Labor governments in the concrete prison.