Australia Is Punishing Children Without Sentencing Them
In our last edition of the Behind Bars Bulletin, we examined the trend of harsher youth bail laws in Australia in recent years, and in particular, their effect of directly increasing children’s exposure to harmful detention practices such as solitary confinement. Stringent bail laws mean that many children in Australia’s youth detention centres are refused bail and instead are being held on remand. It is important, in these discussions, to recognise the particular distinction between being held in detention and being held on remand. While both have the practical result of detaining children in prison, the children being held on remand have not yet been found guilty of an offence, or have not yet been sentenced, yet they are being punished anyway, despite the considerable likelihood that they may be found not guilty, have their charges dropped, or even be given a non-custodial sentence.
The proportion of children being held on remand in detention is astronomically high in Australia. Latest data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare – revealed that on an average day in 2024-25, 4 in 5 young people (80%) over the age of 10 in detention were unsentenced. This means that the large majority of the children being held in juvenile detention in Australia are unconvicted and unsentenced, but are nevertheless being subjected to an incredibly punitive and traumatic environment. Even more disturbingly, more data from the AIHW did an age breakdown of unsentenced and sentenced detention populations, which showed that for the June quarter of 2025, 6.9% of young people in unsentenced detention were between the ages 10-13 but there were zero children in that same age group within the sentenced detention population. These children are in the youngest and therefore most vulnerable age group, and yet it seems that core principles of justice and fairness are simply not being applied to them.
When a 10- or 11-year-old child can be held for months in detention without being found guilty of an offence, what does that say about the state of our youth justice system? Our legal system is predicated upon the presumption of innocence and that people should not be punished for a crime of which they have not been convicted, and yet, some of the most vulnerable in our societies are not being afforded this basic right. Increasingly harsh bail laws, and an overall political tendency towards ‘tough-on-crime’ youth justice policies, directly result in our children being unfairly punished, and over-criminalised. This over-reliance on detention disrupts child development, education, and social connection, and ignores the plethora of evidence about what actually improves recidivism and community safety.
Ensuring the safety of our communities should not come at the expense of our children’s rights and liberties; Australia’s youth bails laws must be reevaluated and reformed to ensure that vulnerable children are protected. We must focus our efforts on evidence-based solutions that address the underlying causes of juvenile offending, rather than punitive policies that simply further contribute to the ‘revolving door’ of youth crime.