I am a permanent member of the Justice, Integrity and Community Safety Committee which sat for estimates hearings on Friday, 24 July 2026.
I asked the Director General of the Department of Youth Justice and Victim Support about the continued use of lockdowns / separations / solitary confinement in youth detention centres because of staff shortages.
You can read our exchange below or in the official Parliamentary transcript of proceedings here.
Mr BERKMAN: I have some questions for the director-general about lockdowns in youth detention centres. Obviously this is vital because children locked down cannot access rehabilitative services and education. The Deputy Premier said recently that he has no sympathy for children unable to shower or exercise or get education during lockdowns given that they occur ‘because some juvenile grub’ has caused them, and I will table that article before I am asked to verify or imputation is suggested. Director-General, is that statement accurate or is it routinely the case that children are locked down in their cells because of staff shortages?
Mr SPEAKER: Does the director-general have that document? If not, can we get that document to the director-general please?
Mrs GERBER: Point of order, Mr Speaker: that question contained an extremely long preamble with a number of statements and I would ask that you seek that the member restate his question with just the question and without the extremely long preamble.
Mr BERKMAN: Happy to restate the question.
Mr SPEAKER: Okay; thank you.
Mr BERKMAN: Director-General, is the Deputy Premier’s statement that lockdowns occur ‘because some juvenile grub’ has caused them accurate, or is it often the case that children are locked down in their cells for long periods because of staff shortages?
Mr Drane: Separations in detention centres occur pursuant to the Youth Justice Regulation. I think it is section 21, from memory, of the regulation that authorises the use of separation. For those not familiar with the act, that is essentially a young person being locked in their room for a period of time. There are some very strict protocols relevant to exercising the separation of any young person in a detention centre and also very prescriptive time limits requiring escalation of approvals. It is the case that the department has a record number of staff working in youth detention centres by virtue of two things. We commissioned and opened the Wacol Youth Remand Centre in April 2025 and we have undertaken significant recruitment and induction of new staffing over the last 12 to 18 months such that there were 189 new staff inducted in the last 12 months. We actually have more staff than we do have budgeted positions in all of our detention centres to account for the fact that obviously some staff are off roster at any point in time with leave entitlements et cetera and also we are building a pathway and we anticipate some of those staff will move to the Woodford Youth Detention Centre. That is the context I want to provide to the member.
Specifically you were alluding to staff shortage related separations. It is well documented—it is a matter of public record—that post the pandemic the department did have some chronic staffing shortages. There were severe staffing shortages particularly at the Cleveland Youth Detention Centre such that there were often protracted and extended periods of staff shortage related separation. Because of the factors that I mentioned earlier—the number of recruits that we have inducted and onboarded and the record number of staff we have—the frequency of staff shortage related separation has reduced exponentially such that 73 per cent of all separations now are for less than two hours.
They are for a very short period of time and they are for risk related separations, so that means where a youth is a risk to themselves or others or is engaging in behaviour—that means they are attempting to assault a peer or a staff member—there is a requirement that staff place them in their rooms to protect against them causing harm to themselves, other young people or staff. It is actually a fundamental pillar of the government’s Detention with Purpose policy, and that is to ensure there are consequences for action and, equally, that there is a response and a risk mitigation for young people engaging in high-risk behaviours. Youth detention centres, as you can appreciate, detain young people who have poor impulse control and often exhibit very violent and frequently unacceptable behaviour, so separation is a necessary risk mitigation. Just to circle back to your particular question, the vast majority of separation in detention at this point in time is risk related separations, so that is in response to specific behaviours or harm, and overwhelmingly 73 per cent of that occurs for the shortest period of time necessary to mitigate that risk, and that is less than two hours.
Mr BERKMAN: Director-General, do the government’s current data collection and reporting practices for separations, including the ICT system, allow the department to see what proportion of children subject to separations have cognitive impairment and what proportion of a child’s sentence is spent locked in their cell?
Mr Drane: There are two parts to that question. Yes, the technology that we operate to record and track and monitor the use of separation does allow us to overlay the individual characteristics of the young person, so that is the first part of your question. The second part is—sorry, but could you just repeat the second part?
Mr BERKMAN: What proportion of a child’s sentence is spent locked in their cell?
Mr Drane: Yes, we can manually extract that information, and we frequently do for court. As I alluded to earlier, post the pandemic—and it is well documented—there were periods of time where the detention centres were chronically short staffed. It became a practice where courts would frequently request that information through the department in tendering pre-sentence reports. So, yes, the department has the ability to determine periods of time or days that a particular young person might have been held in separation.