Youth Justice

The major risk factors for youth criminality include other causes in Be The Change - poverty and disadvantage, homelessness, child protection, mental illness, disability (especially intellectual impairment) and having one or more parents with a criminal record.

As the Australian and New Zealand Children’s Commissioners, Guardians and Advocates note ‘children in the justice system have fragmented education experiences, marked by periods of exclusion and expulsion, resulting in poor educational outcomes. They have precarious living arrangements including homelessness and/or placements in out-of-home care. They have often experienced drug and alcohol related addiction, struggle with complex, unresolved trauma, and live with mental illness and/or disabilities. Children in the justice system have higher rates of speech, language and communication disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorders, foetal alcohol spectrum disorder and acquired/traumatic brain injury’.

Studies have shown that the younger the child is when first having contact with the justice system, the more likely they are to go on to reoffend. This suggests that criminalising the behaviour of young children results in them becoming entrenched in the justice system.

Led by regular headlines in the right-wing media, radio shows and social media sensationalising crimes committed by children and young people, in reality, both sides of government have passed policies to be ‘tough on crime’, including to limit bail for young offenders, causing the population of children in detention to soar.

In 2023, the Queensland government announced ‘even tougher’ responses to youth offending, including longer sentences and the construction of two new youth detention centres, in response to the stabbing death of Brisbane woman Emma Lovell.   In response, the head of the Queensland Family and Child Commission said he is ‘deeply concerned’ at public sentiment calling for more punitive responses to youth crime in the face of clear evidence that ‘tough’ approaches don’t work. Professor Ross Homel, a criminologist at Griffith University, echoed that the detention of young people ‘makes the community less safe. Detention centres are the worst possible places for fixing our broken kids’ .

In 2024, NSW Labor introduced trial reforms to make it harder for 14 to 18 year-olds charged with serious break-and-enter and motor vehicle theft offences while on bail to get bail again.

Then Victorian government buckled to media pressure in 2025, with the Labor government revoking a clause in the Bail Act that remand be a last resort for children charged with a crime, and elevating community safety as the overriding principle for bail decision-making. With ‘adult time for violent crime’ the Premier introduced the ‘toughest bail laws in Australia’ with life sentences for children and removing detention as a last resort, admitting that the changes will lock up more children. 

It’s now the turn of the South Australian Labor government, which unveiled plans to ‘treat teens like bikies’ (as the Advertiser’s front page put it).

In the view of the Human Rights Commission, ‘the treatment of children in the criminal justice system, some as young as 10 years old, is one of the most urgent human rights issues facing Australia today. Numerous inquiries and reviews, including Royal Commissions and UN Committees, have highlighted serious breaches of rights and systemic problems with our child justice and related systems over many years. However, Australia continually fails to implement evidence-based reforms to our child justice systems which would reduce offending behaviour and make our communities safer’.

As the Law Council of Australia notes, ‘these harsh policies do not make our communities safer—especially in the long run. The detention and institutionalisation of children in their formative years is a proven key factor in recidivism rates. It needs to be clearly understood and consistently communicated that policies of remanding and imprisoning children—popular as they may be during perceived youth crime waves—have been comprehensively debunked as effective community safety solutions’. 

A snapshot of the characteristics of children and young people in Youth Justice in Victoria gives a typical overview:

• 53 per cent were a victim of abuse, trauma or neglect as a child

• 41 per cent either have a current child protection case or were previously subject to a child protection order

• 49 per cent present with mental health issues

• 42 per cent have been witness to family violence

• 52 per cent have a history of alcohol and drug use

• 21 per cent live in unsafe or unstable housing

• 31 per cent present with cognitive difficulties that impact on daily functioning.

A 2018 study by the Telethon Kids Institute and the University of Western Australia showed 9 out of 10 children who were incarcerated in WA had some form of neuro-disability, ranging from dyslexia or similar learning disability, language disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, intellectual disability, executive function disorder, memory impairment or motor coordination disorder. More than one in three of these children had Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.

In addition, youth detention, in itself, is associated with an increased risk of suicide, psychiatric disorders, and drug and alcohol abuse. Locking young people up during their crucial years of development also has long-term impacts. These include poor emotional development, poor education outcomes, and worse mental health in adulthood.

Over the years, we have seen repeated reports of the death and serious harm to young people in youth detention from the authorities. 

In 2016, the Royal Commission into the treatment of children in detention centres in the Northern Territory found that these facilities were unfit to accommodate or rehabilitate children and that children were verbally and physically abused, as well as subjected to inappropriate, punitive and degrading treatment in places of detention such as forced restraint.  

Nine years later, an investigation by the Northern Territory’s Office of the Children’s Commissioner found that a young Aboriginal person detained at the Don Dale detention centre was kept in isolation for 84 hours, unable to leave their cell or make contact with any support person, and was denied food for some of that time as a coercion tactic by officers.

Four Corners in 2022 reported prolonged lockdowns, solitary confinement and self-harm and suicide attempts at Perth’s Banksia Hill detention centre; in 2023 the South Australian Children’s Guardian observed that children in the Kurlana Tapa children’s prison were being locked in their cells for up to 23 consecutive hours, partly due to staffing shortages, resulting in increased incidents of self-harm, reduced hours of school attendance for children in prison and difficulties for children to be able to meet with their lawyers; and in 2024 in Queensland ongoing media reports of indefinite detention of children as young as ten in police watchhouses and the Cleveland youth detention centre’s use of solitary confinement in youth detention where two First Nations children with disabilities died after spending extensive time in isolation at overcrowded and understaffed youth detention centres.

In 2025, an Australian Human Right Commission review found that solitary confinement and similar practices remain widespread across Australian youth detention settings with children routinely subjected to isolation for extended periods, often under conditions that fail to meet basic standards of care. These practices cause profound harm to children’s mental health, physical wellbeing and development, and disproportionately impact First Peoples children and children with disability. They also undermine rehabilitation, increase the risk of self-harm and suicide, and perpetuate cycles of trauma and disadvantage.

Given the embedded, complex, interrelated issues these young people face, any diversion program needs substantial resources and time, but can save governments much more, given that it costs over $1 million to house one youth offender. Government programs include Western Australia’s Youth Partnership Project, Victoria’s Embedded Youth Outreach Program, NSW’s Youth on Track, Queensland’s Transition 2 Success and Resolve

We know that these programs work, but they are transient. We need the political will that commits to long term, consistent and adequate resourcing to make them mainstream.  As the Paul Ramsey Foundation concludes, ‘the promise of justice reinvestment is that community-led prevention approaches can reduce demand for the criminal justice system and create cost savings that fund a cycle of pace-based investments. However, despite much community-based work and the expansion of justice reinvestment grant programs, a mechanism for reinvestment has not been fully developed or implemented at either the State or Federal level.’