Queensland's ombudsman, Anthony Reilly, has retreated from his earlier recommendation that the Wacol youth remand centre near Brisbane be closed, despite an inspection report raising serious concerns about the facility's suitability for holding children for extended periods.
The report, published last week, said young people at Wacol were held in conditions with "a lack of space, privacy and natural light". Some children stayed for more than a month, and staff told inspectors that young people from north Queensland "displayed negative behaviours and engaged in acts of self-harm to influence and expedite their transfer to another centre".
Wacol, originally built as a police watch house, was converted under law into a youth detention centre. It is often used to hold Indigenous children from north Queensland because of overcrowding at the Cleveland youth detention centre in Townsville.
Its operation has eased pressure on police watch houses, where vulnerable children were previously held in crowded police cells, in some cases for more than 30 days, due to a lack of available detention places. Data shows fewer children are now held in watch houses, and for shorter periods. Critics and children's advocates say the government has simply shifted the problem to Wacol.
Queensland is building a new youth detention centre at Woodford. Reilly, who described Wacol as "austere and institutional" and had called for it to be closed when the new facility opened, has now backed away from that position, citing the Crisafulli government's new bail laws, dubbed "breach bail, go to jail".
"In the year ahead, it may be the case that the impacts of the above reforms are such that the existing three youth detention centres and the new Woodford youth detention centre do not have sufficient capacity to accommodate the number of children that our criminal justice system requires to be detained," Reilly said in his report.
An inmate advocacy group has attacked the watchdog's "gutless retreat" on the facility.