Close down juvenile detention: US expert

The United States is moving away from large-scale juvenile detention centres to small community rehabilitation programs and Australia should follow suit following the Northern Territory abuse scandal.

That's the view of Vincent Schiraldi who heads up the criminal justice policy program at Harvard Kennedy School.

As director of juvenile corrections in Washington DC and as commissioner of the New York department of probation, Mr Schiraldi oversaw radical reform which attracted commentary in some quarters that he was soft on crime.

But when he took on the Washington DC role, the system was "nothing short of Dickensian" with staff routinely beating and sexual abusing the kids and placing them in isolation.

"Don Dale (NT juvenile detention centre) cannot be fixed," he told the United States Studies Centre in Sydney.

"They need to destroy it, pour salt on the ground and come up with another model that fits the local area."

Failure was endemic to these institutions and they "poisoned" everyone they touched - not just children, he said.

""I'm sure those staff, when they came to work, didn't think that they'd enjoy torturing kids," he said.

Instead Mr Schiraldi backs community rehabilitation programs and, in cases where children still need to be locked up, putting them into small home-like facilities close to families.

But he warned governments should not make the same mistakes as they did when they closed mental health institutions and pocketed the savings rather than reinvesting the money into community programs.

"We've reaped what we have sowed on that and have a lot of mentally ill people in prisons and jails and a lot of homeless mentally ill because we didn't take care of them," he said.

The US has cut down its youth detention centre population by half since the 1990s.

The trend is for facilities up to 10 beds rather than hundreds, he said.

Radical reform was needed in Australia while the "light was shining brightly" on the NT's juvenile justice system.

Meanwhile, indigenous leader Noel Pearson has hit out at "selective outrage" over the NT juvenile detention abuse saga.

Mr Pearson said more focus was needed on preventing children from entering the justice system and Aboriginal people needed to take more responsibility for the welfare of their children.

"We should be outraged about those things that are driving the large numbers of those tragic juveniles, who were once little babies, who were once little toddlers and who have ended up with a bag over their head being abused in an institution," he told ABC TV.