QLD Youth Justice
The State, The Funnel, The Money, The Network, The Evidence, The Place

CivicGraph triangulated four primary datasets, the Queensland Police Service watchhouse-occupancy publication, the QLD state-budget Youth Justice service-delivery statements, the ACNC charity register, AusTender federal procurement, alongside the Australian Living Map of Alternatives evidence base, AIHW child-protection reporting, and NDIS service-district data. Every finding below is a sourced claim with a clickable citation. The pattern they form is structural.

“63% of the 8 children currently in QLD custody are First Nations. ~5% of the 10–17 population.”

The numbers refresh every 12 hours from the QPS public PDF. As of 15 May 2026, 8:00 am, there are 438 people in Queensland watchhouses, 430 adults and 8 children. [1]

Police watchhouses are designed for adult arrestees on short-term pre-charge or pre-court holds. They have no schooling, no programs, no rehabilitation infrastructure, and limited natural light. Children are mixed in the same buildings as the adult population, even where physical separation is enforced. Adult First Nations representation in the same watchhouses sits at 28%. The longest-current adult hold is 12 days, sustained without programs or court progression.

The watchhouse-as-overflow pattern is structural. QLD's seven youth-detention facilities run at 76–92% occupancy depending on the site and time of year. When admissions exceed available beds, the watchhouse population grows. [5]

Closing the Gap target 11 commits the QLD government to reducing the rate of First Nations young people in detention by 30% by 2031. The most recent reported QLD figure in CivicGraph's dataset is 41.1 per 10,000 for 2023-24, with a 41.1 per 10,000 gap from the trajectory target. [12]

“A 30% reduction in First Nations young people in detention by 2031 is the national commitment. The QLD trend is moving the wrong way.”

Children don't arrive in custody directly. They arrive through pipelines, child protection, education disengagement, family violence, disability, mental health, substance use. Every system that fails them is upstream of the watchhouse.

Child protection → youth justice

AIHW data shows ~85% of children in youth detention nationally have prior child-protection contact. In QLD, the ratio is similar. The structural pathway runs: notification → substantiated harm → out-of-home care → placement instability → school disengagement → first police contact → remand. Each step is documented in a separate dataset; no integrated commissioning view exists. [4]

Disability & justice

QLD has approximately 86,747 NDIS participants in the 15–18 age band (state-wide aggregate). Significant numbers cluster in the same service districts as the LGA youth-offender-rate hotspots, Townsville, Logan, Mount Isa. Therapeutic, culturally-safe, NDIS-eligible programs in these districts are scarce; the structural gap is not eligibility but provider capacity. [8]

The mental-health & AOD blind spot

AIHW Youth Justice reporting consistently identifies high rates of mental-health and substance-use co-morbidity in the cohort. [5] CivicGraph's funding-tag data shows 0 QLD justice-funding rows carrying a mental-health or AOD tag. The data gap is the policy gap: where funding doesn't classify a need, that need doesn't show up in commissioning, evaluation, or political accountability.

Education disengagement → welfare → offending

Cross-tabulating QLD LGA-level data: low-ICSEA schools (concentrated disadvantage), JobSeeker / Youth Allowance / DSP recipients, and youth-offender rates correlate spatially. The pipeline from school disengagement → juvenile employment difficulty → early offending is documented in AIFS and ROGS reporting and visible in the LGA hotspots in Volume 6. [20]

The most-debated number in the system is the per-young-person cost of detention. Less debated, but more important, is where the totality of QLD's justice dollar goes.

The ratio matters because detention is structurally more expensive per child than every alternative. Custodial beds are infrastructure: staffed 24/7, carrying capital, security, and overhead costs, ROGS publishes per-jurisdiction recurrent expenditure per young person in detention, and the figure is consistently a multi-fold premium over the per-young-person cost of community-based supervision. The community line covers diversion, family-led decision-making, school re-engagement, mental-health and AOD support, employment pathways, the program work the evidence consistently identifies as effective. Group conferencing alone has the most-rigorous evaluation evidence among the named QLD budget lines. [2] [3]

Where the community $1.49B actually goes

Inside the community-based budget, named-recipient grants flow to a relatively small concentrated set of large national NGOs, Lifeline Community Care, Anglicare/Synod of Brisbane, Mission Australia, Relationships Australia QLD, Life Without Barriers, UnitingCare Community, and others, which together hold the bulk of the dollars. Aboriginal Community-Controlled Organisations are funded too, but at smaller dollar amounts and on shorter contract terms. The dashboard view shows the full top-25. [6]

The ACCO funding gap

ACCOs receive 12% of named-recipient youth-justice grant dollars in CivicGraph's dataset, while First Nations young people are the majority of children in QLD watchhouses on any given day, live data shows 63% today. [1] The gap is structural, not incidental: ACCOs typically operate on shorter funding cycles, smaller per-grant amounts, and higher reporting overheads relative to scale. The Pathways to Justice report (ALRC 2018) flagged this; the gap persists. [18]

The share number is the static picture. The retention number is the moving one. CivicGraph's v_acco_yj_retention_qld view computes year-over-year continuity for community-controlled organisations receiving QLD youth-justice funding: of the ACCOs funded in year N, what share are still funded in year N+1? Across 2018-19 through 2021-22, retention sat at 100%, near-perfect continuity. By 2024-25→2025-26, retention had fallen to 25%. The cohort sizes are small (10–14 ACCOs per year), so single contract decisions move the rate substantially, but the directional break is consistent across the four most recent windows. What the data confirms: of the ACCOs funded in 2023-24, fewer than one in three received QLD YJ funding the following year. Whether that reflects deliberate procurement consolidation, contract-cycle timing, or pipeline gaps is something the data alone can't adjudicate, but it is the trend, and it should be a procurement-policy question, not a coincidence.

Foundation giving

Australian foundations index in CivicGraph at significant annual scales: Paul Ramsay Foundation, Minderoo, BHP Foundation, Smith Family Foundation, Macquarie Group Foundation. Combined annual giving across the top 10 indexed in our dataset: substantial, but the thematic addresses (youth, indigenous, education, child welfare) rarely route to QLD youth-justice specifically. Foundation strategy has so far preferred adjacent thematic areas (early-childhood education, employment, trauma-informed services for women and children) over direct youth-justice anchoring. [24] [25]

Federal procurement

Federal AusTender contracts to youth-justice-relevant suppliers in CivicGraph's dataset total $1.56B across 139 contracts. Federal procurement reaches the same supplier pool that holds state grants, Mission Australia, UnitingCare, Anglicare, Lifeline, alongside infrastructure suppliers (detention build, case-management software). [7]

“1.26:1 detention to community. Group conferencing, the most evidence-backed line, sits at ~2.9% of the three-line total.”

A handful of organisations sit at the centre of the system. They hold contracts across multiple topic streams, span multiple states, and overlap at the governance level, same directors, same auditors, same board interlocks. This isn't scandalous; it's structural. But it shapes who gets heard in policy, who has the capacity to absorb a growth budget, and where bargaining power sits when contracts are renegotiated.

Multi-system providers

The top 8 cross-sector providers in QLD each touch 3+ of the topic streams youth-justice / child-protection / NDIS / family-services / indigenous / mental-health. Largest by combined funding: Total at $10.42B across 5 streams. Cumulative across the top 8: $13.20B.

Concentration matters in two ways. First, when one major provider falters operationally, the system feels it, QLD has experienced this in family-services and out-of-home care twice in the past five years. Second, the same providers are both contractor and policy adviser: they sit on government advisory groups, file submissions to inquiries, and contribute to the discourse that shapes the next funding round. The boundary is thin.

Director networks

CivicGraph's person-influence index identifies individuals who sit on 5+ entity boards across justice-funded organisations. Top by combined justice-funded portfolio: John Wakefield at $1.64B across 9 boards. The top 6 between them oversee $9.62B in justice-funded entity assets.

Governance overlap is unavoidable in a small sector; the question is whether it's legible. ACNC reporting captures who sits on what board, but funders rarely cross-reference grant recipients against director maps before commissioning. The full director-board matrix is available in the dashboard view at Volume 4 §14.

Political donations from contractors

AEC annual returns disclose political donations by donor entity. Cross-referencing donor ABNs against the YJ-funded recipient list identifies a small number of contractors who also donate to political parties. Quantum is modest relative to grant scale; the structural question is whether the disclosure regime gives funders, parliaments, and the public enough visibility into the relationship between procurement, advocacy, and political contribution. [14]

The full network is best explored interactively. See the QLD youth-justice network graph →

The Australian Living Map of Alternatives (ALMA) catalogues community-endorsed and evaluated diversion, wraparound, and reinvestment programs across Australia. It contains 581 youth-justice-tagged interventions nationally; 626 have explicit Queensland presence. [10]

Evidence levels split roughly into three tiers: Proven (rigorously evaluated, demonstrable outcomes), Promising (community-endorsed, emerging evidence), and Untested (theory or pilot stage). Most ALMA-listed QLD interventions sit at “Promising”, reflecting not that programs don't work, but that evaluation funding hasn't historically been resourced alongside delivery.

The unfunded effective programs

CivicGraph identifies 5 ALMA-listed QLD or national programs graded “Proven” or “Promising” with no traceable funding link in our dataset. Examples include: Youth Justice family-led decision making, Youth Justice Indigenous Support, Youth Yarnz After Dark, Relationships Australia QLD Family & Youth Counselling. These programs are running, mostly with grant top-ups, philanthropic seed funding, or volunteer labour, but have no operational state-budget anchor.

Royal commissions and inquiries, the recommendation lineage

The structural recommendations have been made, repeatedly:

• Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991), 339 recommendations, many directly relevant to youth-justice over-representation. [17]
• Bringing Them Home (1997), the structural relationship between forced child removal and intergenerational harm runs directly into the contemporary YJ system. [19]
• Pathways to Justice (ALRC, 2018), specific recommendations on ACCO funding, justice reinvestment, and bail-and-remand reform. [18]
• NT Royal Commission (2017), 227 recommendations covering detention, child protection, policing, and community-led prevention. Structurally applicable beyond the NT. Implementation has been partial. [16]
• Multiple QLD coronial findings and parliamentary inquiries on youth-justice deaths-in-custody and watchhouse incidents.

The pattern is consistent: the prescriptive content of these reports overlaps significantly. The implementation gap is the recurring failure mode, not the absence of recommendations.

Youth justice doesn't happen statewide; it happens in places. The same handful of QLD LGAs, Townsville, Logan, Mount Isa, Cherbourg, Cairns, appear at the top of every cross-system metric: youth-offender rate, NDIS participant density, low-ICSEA schools, JobSeeker recipients, foster-care entries.

LGA hotspots

Top 6 QLD LGAs by pipeline-intensity score (composite of welfare density, school disadvantage, Indigenous share) in CivicGraph's cross-system dataset: Lockyer Valley (intensity 70.0, 12% Indigenous); Mareeba (intensity 49.2, 27% Indigenous); Somerset (intensity 49.2, 14% Indigenous); Southern Downs (intensity 49.2, 14% Indigenous); Douglas (intensity 43.1, 18% Indigenous).

Place case studies

Cherbourg. Discrete Aboriginal community. High youth-offender rate, deep cultural authority, several locally-rooted programs in the ALMA register. State-budget grants flow disproportionately to mainstream NGOs delivering “in” the community rather than to ACCOs operating “of” the community. The structural funding gap is highest where the cultural authority is strongest.

Mount Isa. Remote, dispersed, mining-town economy. Youth-justice infrastructure is thin; the watchhouse functions as both a holding and a transfer point. Multi-agency presence (NDIS, family services, AOD, mental health) but limited coordination at the case level.

Townsville. Cleveland Youth Detention Centre catchment. Highest absolute youth-detention numbers in the state. Multi-system providers run multiple co-located programs, but the per-young-person service coverage in adjacent disadvantage statistics suggests the funnel into justice persists.

Justice reinvestment, the operational template

Maranguka (Bourke, NSW) is the operational reference site. KPMG's 2018 independent Impact Assessment reported a 23% drop in police-recorded incidents of family violence, a 31% increase in Year-12 retention, and an estimated $3.1M gross impact in the evaluation year. The model is community-led, place-based, multi-funder (philanthropic + state + federal), and operates with a long-term time horizon. [11]

Queensland has emerging community-led pilots, in Townsville, Cherbourg, Mount Isa, and the Cape, but no operational equivalent at Maranguka's scale, time-horizon, or evaluation rigor. The structural ingredients (multi-funder commitment, ACCO governance, place-anchored data infrastructure) exist; the political work on a 10-year horizon does not.

“A 23% drop in police-recorded family-violence incidents and a 31% increase in Year-12 retention, evaluated independently.”

The data so far describes the system as it stands. Volume 7 describes the direction it is moving in, through legislation, capital investment, and ministerial signalling. The consistent pattern across the past 24 months: capacity is being expanded; sentencing is being hardened; the institutional counter-balances are being removed.

The Human Rights Act overrides

QLD's Human Rights Act 2019 commenced with a stated work on a rights-based approach to public-policy law-making. By August 2023, the Act had been overridden twice in 18 months, both times to expand custody powers over children. [27] The first override (March 2023, breach-of-bail offence) was the precedent; the second (August 2023, children-in-adult-watchhouses authorisation) named December 2026 as a sunset date. The legislative architecture changed before the political conversation did.

Making Queensland Safer Act 2024

Act No. 54 of 2024, assented 13 December 2024. The most-significant single piece of youth-justice legislation Queensland has passed in the past decade. [30] Three structural changes:

• “Detention as a last resort” removed from the Youth Justice Act, reversing the foundational sentencing principle that had distinguished youth from adult criminal law since 1992.
• Adult sentences for 13 listed offences committed by children, murder, manslaughter, robbery, dangerous operation of a vehicle and others. Same maximum, mandatory and minimum penalties as adults.
• Restorative justice removed as a sentencing option for those offences.

The Adult Crime Adult Time Amendment Bill 2025 sought to expand the list by ~20 further offences. UN Special Rapporteurs Alice Jill Edwards (torture) and Albert K. Barume (Indigenous peoples) wrote to Australian authorities expressing concern. [32] The National Children's Commissioner and QLD Human Rights Commission publicly opposed. [29]

Path to Treaty repealed on the first day of new government

The Path to Treaty Act 2023 (Act No. 12 of 2023, passed 10 May 2023) established the First Nations Treaty Institute and a Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry, institutional architecture for addressing the systemic conditions (including youth-justice over-representation) that a treaty / truth process is intended to confront. [31] The Crisafulli LNP Government repealed the Act on its first day of sitting (28 November 2024), bundling the repeal into a Bill amending the Brisbane Olympic Games Act. QAIHC and Indigenous health peak bodies publicly opposed. The institutional counter-balance was removed before alternative governance architecture replaced it.

The live legislative pipeline

Beyond the four headline Acts above, the QLD Parliament Bills register, scraped live from parliament.qld.gov.au, shows 6 youth-justice-relevant bills currently tracked in qld_bills. The most-recent are listed below with their official status; each links to the bill text on the parliamentary record.

• Expanding Adult Crime, Adult Time and Taking a Strong Stance on Drugs and Anti-Social Behaviour Amendment Bill 2026, Hon L Gerber MP (LNP), PASSED with amendment (2026-04-23)
  From the Explanatory Note, The objective of the Bill is to make Queensland safer and strengthen the capability of the criminal justice system to hold perpetrators to account. This is achieved by: prescribing new Adult Crime, Adult Time offences; repealing the current Police Drug Diversion Program (PDDP) and introducing the new Illicit Drug Enforcement and Diversion Framework (IDEDF);…
  [bill text ↗] · [explanatory note ↗] · [statement of compatibility ↗]
• Criminal Code (Defence of Dwellings and Other Premises—Castle Law) Amendment Bill 2026, Mr R Katter MP (KAP), Referred to Committee (2026-03-04)
  From the Explanatory Note, The primary objective of the Bill is to enshrine in Queensland law the clear and unambiguous principle that a person’s home is their castle. The Bill strengthens the rights of law-abiding Queenslanders to defend their dwellings and other premises from unlawful intrusion, seeks to broaden the circumstances in which an individual can lawfully respond to a…
  [bill text ↗] · [explanatory note ↗] · [statement of compatibility ↗]
• Youth Justice (Electronic Monitoring) Amendment Bill 2025, Hon L Gerber MP (LNP), PASSED (2026-02-12)
  From the Explanatory Note, Section 52AA of the Youth Justice Act 1992 (the Youth Justice Act) currently allows a court, in certain circumstances, to impose on a grant of bail a condition that the child must wear a monitoring device while released on bail. Section 52AA was introduced in 2021 to facilitate a trial of electronic monitoring as a bail condition and included an expiry…
  [bill text ↗] · [explanatory note ↗] · [statement of compatibility ↗]
• Making Queensland Safer (Adult Crime, Adult Time) Amendment Bill 2025, Hon D Crisafulli MP (LNP), PASSED (2025-05-21)
  From the Explanatory Note, The objective of the Bill is to enhance community safety by prescribing new ‘Adult Crime, Adult Time’ offences, and to make minor amendments to ensure the recently introduced Making Queensland Safer laws operate as intended. The Making Queensland Safer Plan (the Plan) was a cornerstone of the Government’s 2024 State Election campaign. The Plan is the direct…
  [bill text ↗] · [explanatory note ↗] · [statement of compatibility ↗]
• Youth Justice (Monitoring Devices) Amendment Bill 2025, Hon L Gerber MP (LNP), PASSED (2025-04-02)
  From the Explanatory Note, Section 52AA of the Youth Justice Act 1992 (the YJ Act) allows a court, in certain circumstances, to impose on a grant of bail to a child who is at least 15 years, is charged with a prescribed indictable offence, and has either been charged with an unrelated prescribed indictable offence in the preceding twelve months or has been previously found guilty of…
  [bill text ↗] · [explanatory note ↗] · [statement of compatibility ↗]
• Making Queensland Safer Bill 2024, Hon D Crisafulli MP (LNP), PASSED with amendment (2024-12-12)
  From the Explanatory Note, The overarching objective of the Making Queensland Safer Bill 2024 (the Bill) is to give effect to the Government’s election commitment to implement legislative reforms as part of the Making Queenslander Safer Plan (the Plan), including ‘adult crime, adult time’. The Plan is the direct response of the Government to growing community concern and outrage over…
  [bill text ↗] · [explanatory note ↗] · [statement of compatibility ↗]

The cumulative direction is clear: every YJ-relevant Act passed under the current Government has expanded custody powers. Not one has expanded community-based capacity, evaluation, or ACCO funding share.

“Adult Crime, Adult Time expands to 45 offences.”

Capacity expansion, 120 new beds in the pipeline

Three facility decisions are reshaping QLD's detention-bed footprint. All were announced under the Palaszczuk Labor Government (2023–2024) and continue under the Crisafulli LNP Government, political ownership is bipartisan in practice:

• Wacol Youth Remand Centre, 76 beds, remand-only. Construction $250M+; first three years operations ~$150M. Opened early 2025. [33]
• Woodford Youth Detention Centre, 80 beds. Sod turned February 2024. Reported construction cost up to $627.61M per industry-tracker figures pending verification against QLD Budget Paper 3. Completion target 2026.
• Cairns Youth Detention Centre, 40 beds, FNQ. Site selection 2024. Forecast operational 2027.

Combined Woodford + Cairns: 120 beds added to QLD's detention capacity. Each bed represents a structural commitment for 30+ years. The same capital scale could have funded the operational scale-up of every “promising” ALMA intervention in §16 with evaluation budget left over.

Independent oversight findings

The QLD Ombudsman / Inspector of Detention Services has tabled a series of findings across 2024–2025. [28]

• Cleveland Youth Detention Centre (27 Aug 2024), chronic staff shortages, children locked alone in their rooms. On one inspection day, 40% of Cleveland's 96 inmates were held in bare cells. Average separation length in 2022–23 was 8 hrs 36 min. 15 recommendations.
• Cairns + Murgon watchhouses (2024), specific focus on children in regional watchhouses, the operational reality of the watchhouse-as-overflow pattern in §1.
• Combined Youth Detention Centres report (2025), the cross-system pattern.
• 2019 Brisbane City Watchhouse, ABC Four Corners + Amnesty International documented 89 children in custody at one point in May 2019, with one young person held in isolation for 23 days. Triggered international scrutiny.

CivicGraph also ingests the QLD Coroners Court findings register (live-scraped via Playwright). Recent in-custody / youth-justice-flagged findings include:

• Inquest into the death of Benjamin Freear (2026-04-23), in custody. [finding PDF ↗]
• Inquest into the death of Francis Michael Fahey, Coroner CATCHWORDS (2026-04-13), in custody. [finding PDF ↗]
• Inquest into the death of Garry Reginald Dubois, Coroner Gallagher (2026-01-29), in custody. [finding PDF ↗]
• Inquest into the death of Kamalavati Sundar (2025-10-22), in custody. [finding PDF ↗]
• Findings of the inquest into the passing of atj (2025-10-14), in custody. [finding PDF ↗]
• Inquest into the death of Peter Owen Pilkington, Coroner CATCHWORDS (2025-10-07), 27 recommendations, in custody. [finding PDF ↗]

A clarification often missed in public reporting: the high-profile Cleveland Dodd coronial inquest (16-year-old Yamatji boy, died October 2023) is a Western Australian case at Unit 18, Casuarina Prison, not QLD's Cleveland Youth Detention Centre in Townsville. We do not surface the Dodd inquest in this QLD report.

“The 2024 QLD legislation is a flagrant disregard of children's rights and a clear breach of Australia's international obligations.”

Live ministerial-statement feed

For the most-recent QLD Government youth-justice announcements with direction-of-travel classification (punitive / preventive / mixed), see the Direction of travel live feed in the dashboard view (§23). The feed is scraped daily from statements.qld.gov.au; this section will pick up new announcements automatically as they're published.

Three structural moves stand out from the data. None require new policy frameworks, the prescriptive content of Closing the Gap, Pathways to Justice, the Justice Reinvestment Network's sector roadmap, and the QLD government's own Youth Justice Strategy 2019–2023 already point in this direction.

1. Move the detention-to-community spend ratio. A $200M reallocation from detention to community-based services would be roughly a 13% expansion of the $1.49B community line, enough to fund the scale-up of every “Promising” ALMA intervention with a credible delivery footprint, alongside the evaluation work needed to lift the most-promising ones to “Proven”.

2. Triple the ACCO funding share. Aboriginal Community-Controlled Organisations consistently outperform mainstream NGOs in retention and outcomes for First Nations young people. The dollar share doesn't reflect this. Closing the Gap target 11 commits the QLD government to addressing this gap; the procurement architecture has not yet caught up to the policy commitment.

3. Resource evaluation alongside delivery. The reason most ALMA interventions sit at “Promising” rather than “Proven” is that programs are funded to deliver, not to be evaluated. A small percentage of every grant (3–5%) ringfenced for monitoring and evaluation, plus a sector-wide outcome-data infrastructure, would close the evidence gap within a budget cycle.

What this means for you

Every numerical claim is traceable to one of the sources below. Live data refreshes from QPS twice daily; funding tables refresh nightly; ACNC, AusTender, NDIS, and DSS feeds refresh on their respective publication cadences. The ALMA evidence base is community-maintained and updated on a rolling basis.