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

The bed problem, detention occupancy + watchhouse-as-overflow

QLD operates 0 youth-detention facilities with a combined capacity of 0 beds. When detention runs near capacity, watchhouses become overflow. Below: facilities + a 60-day trailing average of children in police watchhouses.

The pipeline, vulnerability hotspots by QLD LGA

Top 15 QLD Local Government Areas ranked by pipeline intensity, a composite score from lga_cross_system_stats combining welfare-recipient density, school disadvantage, and Indigenous-population share. With cross-system context: NDIS youth, JobSeeker, schools, and tracked funding.

Source: lga_cross_system_stats. Pipeline intensity is a composite score (welfare density + school disadvantage + Indigenous share). Youth pop estimated from QLD state-level 10–17 share (10.4% per ABS ERP June 2024) where per-LGA ABS data not yet ingested, flagged in sources.youth_population_method. Per-LGA youth-offender rates aren't yet sourced into this dataset for QLD. Funding = grants traced through this LGA in our dataset.

Disability & justice, NDIS youth in QLD

The disability-criminalisation pipeline: cognitive impairment, autism, FASD and intellectual disability are over-represented in detention. Below: NDIS youth (15–18) by category in QLD overall.

NDIS overlay data not loaded.

Source: v_ndis_youth_justice_overlay. AIHW Youth Justice reporting identifies cognitive disability over-representation in the cohort; NDIS data is one of the only structured records of disability supports for young people 15–18. Categories are not mutually exclusive: a participant can hold more than one primary disability classification, so the autism / intellectual / psychosocial counts may sum higher than the youth (15–18) total.

The mental health & AOD blind spot

The data gap is the policy gap. CivicGraph indexes thousands of QLD justice-funding rows and ALMA-catalogued programs. Mental-health and alcohol-and-other-drug surface counts:

AIHW Youth Justice reporting consistently identifies high rates of mental-health and substance-use co-morbidity in the cohort. The QLD justice-funding stream tags 0 rows for mental health or AOD. If you can't name the issue in the data, you can't fund it accountably.

Education disengagement → welfare → offending

Welfare payments (Disability Support Pension, JobSeeker, Youth Allowance) cluster in the same QLD LGAs as low-ICSEA schools and high youth-offender rates. The pipeline doesn't start with the police, it starts with disengagement.

The §4 hotspot table above shows that LGAs with the highest pipeline-intensity scores also carry the highest count of low-ICSEA schools (the ACARA Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage; lower scores indicate concentrated disadvantage). The system doesn't fail at the courthouse; it fails at the schoolyard.

Read horizontally: each LGA's welfare load + school-disadvantage profile + Indigenous share. ICSEA: ACARA Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage; 1000 is the national mean. Schools below 970 carry meaningful disadvantage; cells highlighted in red. Five-or-more low-ICSEA schools in an LGA also flagged. Source: lga_cross_system_stats · DSS Demographics 2024 + ACARA ICSEA + ABS ERP.

What was announced, and what's actually locked in

19 major QLD youth-justice initiatives, each laid out as a circuit diagram: Announcement → Bill → $ Funded → Delivery → Circuit breaker. Where a node is missing, the gap is the data: an announcement without a bill is rhetoric; a bill without a funded program is paper; a funded program without an announcement is invisible. Each row ends with the explicit Circuit breaker, the leverage point that would change the trajectory.

Reading the patterns: a row with a red Bill PASSED badge and no matched funding line is custody-expansion law without parallel community investment, a one-way ratchet. A row with announcement + funding match but no bill is a community program running on appropriation, vulnerable to defunding without legislative friction. A row with announced, no bill, no funding visible is rhetoric until proven otherwise. Limits: 19 major initiatives curated. Pair this registry with the per-recipient drill-downs (Detail → on each row of the §9 table) to see who's actually delivering each funded line.

Foundation landscape, billions in adjacent giving, none anchored to QLD YJ

The 12 largest Australian foundations whose stated thematic focus includes justice / youth / children / First Nations / disability / mental health. Annual giving listed; most are not anchored specifically to QLD youth-justice work.

Federal procurement, Austender contracts to YJ-relevant suppliers

Top 12 federal Austender suppliers with names matching common YJ / community-services keywords (Mission Australia, Anglicare, Uniting, PCYC, Halikos, Liquidlogic, Save the Children).

The multi-system providers, orgs operating across 3+ sectors

QLD providers with funding flows tagged across at least 3 of: youth-justice, child-protection, disability, NDIS, family services, Indigenous services, mental health, homelessness, AOD, family violence. These are de-facto integrated service hubs, fragmented across siloed funding mechanisms.

Director interlocks, who sits on multiple boards

People holding 5+ board / advisory positions across charities or Indigenous corporations connected to justice funding. The federation's shadow network: governance, advocacy, and funding all run through a small cohort. Read the $ figures as network-cumulative, not per-person: if two listed directors sit on the same board, both rows include that board's funding total, so the same dollars appear against multiple people. The point of the table is the overlap, not an individual exposure.

See the QLD YJ network graph →

Political donations by orgs that hold QLD YJ funding

Cross-reference: QLD youth-justice-funded recipients (by ABN) appear in the federal political-donations register. These donations may relate to any of the donor org's activities, not specifically to youth-justice work. Read as a structural-overlap signal, not as a YJ-attributable transfer.

The ALMA evidence base

The Australian Living Map of Alternatives (ALMA), a civil-society register of community-endorsed and evaluated diversion / wraparound / justice-reinvestment / therapeutic / community-led programs. National counts by type, and the top 0 QLD-relevant interventions ranked by evidence + portfolio score.

Methodology: Evidence levels are self-attributed by ALMA submitters at registration time, not independently graded by CivicGraph. “Proven” / “Effective” / “Promising” reflect the program's own claim about its evaluation status, read as a starting point, not a verdict.

The royal-commission inheritance

Six landmark inquiries shape what's known about youth-justice failures in Australia. QLD has not had a major youth-detention royal commission of its own; it inherits the lessons.

Place case studies, top 4 QLD LGAs by pipeline-intensity score

The §4 table ranks the top 15 QLD LGAs by pipeline-intensity score. Below: a fact card per LGA showing the cross-system context.

QLD LGAs ranked by pipeline-intensity score

The hotspot pattern is geographic. Top 15 QLD LGAs ranked by the composite pipeline-intensity score (welfare-recipient density + school disadvantage + Indigenous-population share), with funding tracked through CivicGraph's dataset shown as the bar magnitude. Per-LGA youth-offender rates aren't yet sourced into this dataset.

Justice reinvestment, the Bourke benchmark

Bourke (NSW) is Australia's longest-running place-based justice-reinvestment site. Outcomes are evaluated and published. QLD has no operational equivalent at scale; the model is replicable but unfunded for QLD hotspots.

What QLD ministers are saying about youth justice

The 0 most-recent statements from statements.qld.gov.au. Each is auto-tagged by direction-of-travel: punitive (custody-expanding), preventive (community-investing), mixed. Read horizontally for the system's real direction.

Source: civic_ministerial_statements via the scrape-ministerial-statements agent. Classifier reads headlines, e.g. “Adult Crime, Adult Time” → punitive; “early intervention” → preventive. Click a card to read the full statement on statements.qld.gov.au.

Structural policy backdrop

The major QLD legislative and treaty-framework moves over 2023–2024 that frame every announcement above. These are curated reference items linked to the underlying QLD legislation register.

Oversight, inspection & coronial findings

What independent inspectors and oversight bodies have found about the QLD youth-justice operation. Sourced from the Inspector of Detention Services, the Australian Human Rights Commission, and human-rights research bodies. Each entry links to the originating report.

Source: QLD Ombudsman / Inspector of Detention Services (ombudsman.qld.gov.au) and Australian Human Rights Commission.

QLD Parliament, what MPs are actually saying

Most-recent youth-justice mentions in QLD Parliament Hansard, scraped from parliament.qld.gov.au. Each card shows the speaker, party, sitting date, and the opening of their contribution. Filter: keyword match in body_text on youth justice / adult crime / detention / watchhouse / bail / Making Queensland Safer.

Source: civic_hansard table populated by scrape-qld-hansard agent. 0 most-recent youth-justice mentions shown; party-bar covers the last 12 months. Speaker-name parsing is best-effort from PDF text and may render as surnames only.

YJ-relevant bills · already-passed

Bills passed (or with amendment) since 2024, scraped via Playwright from the official QLD Parliament register. Each card opens to a curated drawer with key amendments + opposition voices + capital backing + outcome proxies. Read alongside §24.6 (active) for the full pipeline.

The same bill names extracted from civic_hansard.body_text via v_qld_yj_bills_active, how often each appeared in debate. Yellow rail = YJ-specific by name pattern.

Bill names extracted by regex from PDF Hansard text, minor edge-case captures may include leading sentence fragments. Verify against the QLD Bills register at parliament.qld.gov.au before quoting. The proper bills-register scraper is queued, Hansard-derived list is a free interim cut.

Promise → action → outcomes, does the chain hold?

For each major QLD policy promise we map the chain: the announcement (what was said), the bill (what was passed), the implementing department or contractor (who delivers), and the live outcomes data we can read against it (what changed). Where the chain breaks, where promise outpaces action, where action lands but outcomes don't move, or where the system pretends two contradictory promises can both be delivered, the gap is the story. Four chains, ordered roughly by the gap between announcement and outcome.

Method: each chain anchors a high-profile QLD YJ policy promise and traces it through the live data we hold, ministerial statements (§23), bills register (§24.7), watchhouse occupancy (§1), CTG progress (§3), ACCO funding share (§10), capital backing (§2), and coronial outcomes (§24). Where outcome data is missing or moves the wrong way, the chain's “status” line surfaces it. We're building richer outcome ingestion (recidivism by year, detention bed-day cost, ACCO retention rates) for next iteration.