Use this as an active operating surface or current narrative. Keep this as one of the main working surfaces and use it to direct people to the next action.
Watch-house custody, detention and remand
This page separates the live daily QPS watch-house count from the annual detention, court, order and supervision context. That matters: watch-house data is current custody pressure, while detention, remand and orders still rely on annual public releases until a daily source is found or requested.
Loaded from the stored CivicGraph snapshot table. The automation preserves each QPS generated timestamp so this can become a daily time series.
QPS statewide custody total
10 watch-houses with children
18 of 22 children in the snapshot
No children over 7 days in this snapshot
Rockhampton in the fetched PDF
Adult custody pressure still matters
Where children were held in the QPS snapshot
These are the child rows visible in the QPS PDF. The next system step is to store every 6am and 6pm PDF as a dated snapshot, then alert when children appear, stay longer than 72 hours, or move between locations.
| Watch-house | Children | First Nations | Non-Indigenous | Female | 0-2d | 3-7d | Longest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brisbane Watch-house | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1d |
| Bundaberg Watch-house | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 5d |
| Caboolture Watch-house | 4 | 0 | 4 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 3d |
| Cairns Watch-house | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 1d |
| Hervey Bay Watch-house | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2d |
| Logan District Watch-house | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | same day |
| Mount Isa Watch-house | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1d |
| Southport Watch-house | 3 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 3d |
| Toowoomba Watch-house | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1d |
| Townsville Watch-house | 4 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 0 | 2d |
The QPS source says this reporting was created for open watch-house capacity reporting and responds to Women's Safety and Justice Taskforce recommendations and Queensland Human Rights Commission requests.
QPS's 2025 review says watch-houses are short-term holding facilities and are generally not designed or resourced to hold prisoners beyond 72 hours.
QFCC reports 7,807 times children and young people were held in watch-houses or police stations in 2023-24, with 59.2% recorded as First Nations.
Is today's number part of a bigger pattern?
The QPS PDF tells us the current custody pressure. The yearly tables show the longer pattern: thousands of child watch-house episodes each year, more children staying over a week, and a decade of youth justice order admissions that should be read beside detention, remand and watch-house pressure.
2021-22 to 2023-24 QFCC/QPS series
8-14 days plus 15+ days, 2021-22 to 2023-24
2014-15 to 2023-24 QGSO time series
QPS review total admissions; 7,432 were children
Children held in watch-houses and police stations
This is the strongest annual watch-house series found so far. It counts times children and young people were held, not unique children. The over-seven-day column is the clearest escalation signal.
| Year | Total | 1 day or less | 2 days | 3-4d | 5-7d | 8-14d | 15+d | >7d |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | 8,028 | 6,053 | 1,140 | 398 | 288 | 147 | 2 | 149 |
| 2022-23 | 8,100 | 5,479 | 1,303 | 391 | 401 | 398 | 128 | 526 |
| 2023-24 | 7,807 | 5,237 | 1,185 | 354 | 343 | 440 | 248 | 688 |
Supervised youth justice order admissions
This is not the daily service-centre caseload, but it shows the scale of the community and detention order system feeding into watch-house pressure.
Note: QGSO marks a time-series break in 2017-18 due to the inclusion of 17-year-old offenders in the youth justice system from February 2018.
The daily watch-house count needs these annual baselines beside it
average daily young people in Queensland youth detention centres in 2023-24
245 remand plus 1 pre-court custody on an average day in youth detention centres
young people under any youth justice supervision on an average day in Queensland
share of supervised young people who were supervised in the community on an average day
admissions to supervised, unsupervised, and other youth justice orders in 2023-24
unique child defendants with at least one finalised court appearance in 2023-24
What the order system shows
These are admissions to orders, not current daily caseload. They are still useful because they show the size of the community pathway that should sit upstream from watch-houses and detention.
Includes detention and community-based supervised orders.
Probation, community service, restorative justice, conditional release and related orders.
Detention-based order admissions, excluding suspended detention tied to conditional release.
Fine, good behaviour and reprimand orders.
Ancillary and other order categories.
Source status by question
The latest stored QPS snapshot is now read from qld_watchhouse_snapshots when available.
Gap: Needs continuous twice-daily collection so the yearly point-in-time series grows from here.
286 in QGSO detention-centre average; 318.3 in AIHW supervision/detention dataset definitions
Gap: No current public daily occupancy feed found in this pass.
246 average daily unsentenced detention in 2023-24: 245 remand and 1 pre-court custody
Gap: No daily court/remand queue feed found yet.
9,679 order admissions and 1,598 average daily supervision context
Gap: Need service-centre caseloads, local queues, breach flows, and current order counts.
Murri Watch, Youth Advocacy Centre, Caboolture Hub and Wacol traces already in the tracker
Gap: Need live provider roster, service coverage, and contact/referral details for each watch-house region.
Where the rest of the data sits
This is the full data shape for the page. The watch-house PDF is only one layer. The useful operating view needs daily custody, annual justice context, funding/provider data, and outreach/status data in one place.
| Dataset | Question it answers | Cadence | Shown now | Next system move | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| QPS twice-daily watch-house PDF | How many people and children are in each watch-house right now? | 6am and 6pm | Daily snapshot table on this page. | Automate fetch, parse, and store every timestamp before the fixed PDF is overwritten. | live source, not yet persisted |
| QFCC Child Rights Report 2025 | How many times were children held in watch-houses each year, and for how long? | annual report | Yearly length-of-stay table on this page. | Backfill monthly counts if QPS/QFCC can provide the underlying unpublished data. | summarised here |
| QPS Watch-house Review 2025 | How big is the watch-house system and how many admissions does it process? | review report | System context: 63 watch-houses, 891 beds, 555 cells, 2024 admissions. | Extract the full review tables and annexure into the tracker evidence layer. | summarised here |
| QGSO Justice report | What is happening in youth detention, remand, courts, and youth justice orders? | annual release | Detention, remand, court, and order baselines on this page. | Import all youth justice tables as structured annual time series. | partly surfaced |
| AIHW Youth Justice in Australia | What is the average daily supervision picture across detention and community? | annual release | Average daily supervision and detention/community split. | Keep as a national comparator layer beside QGSO state figures. | partly surfaced |
| CivicGraph justice_funding and supplier map | Who is funded to deliver bail, watch-house support, prevention, and throughcare? | database refresh | Linked through delivery ledger, announcements, supplier map, and trackers. | Join providers to ABNs, contracts, contacts, GHL outreach, and story collection status. | connected elsewhere |
Refresh path for the next build
Fetch twice daily
Pull the fixed QPS PDF URL after 6am and 6pm and record the PDF generated timestamp.
Parse rows
Extract every watch-house row by age group, First Nations status, gender and custody duration bucket.
Store snapshots
Write to a dated watch-house snapshot table and keep history rather than overwriting the current PDF.
Trigger action
Alert when children appear, stays exceed 72 hours, numbers spike, or a region lacks visible support-service evidence.
Where each number comes from
Release cadence and current PDF link.
Generated snapshot used for the child location table.
Network size, 72-hour suitability, admissions and operating context.
Court, youth justice orders, detention-centre and legal-status tables.
Youth justice supervision, community and detention average-day context.
Watch-house annual child counts, remand and rights context.