The slogan was never about safety.

By Dylan  ·  April 2026

Premier Crisafulli has a number he likes to repeat. Victims of crime are down 7.2 per cent. Then 10.8 per cent. Proof, he says, that "adult crime, adult time" is working. That tougher laws mean safer streets.

The number is not what it claims to be. And the government knows that too.

The numbers are not real

Those falling victim figures come from Queensland Police Service monthly data — a reporting system this government created and controls. The Australian Bureau of Statistics uses different counting methods, different definitions, different extraction practices. The two datasets are not comparable. QPS says so itself, on its own website, warning that monthly comparisons are unreliable and that longer time series are needed to account for seasonal variation.

The government is doing exactly what its own police service advises against.

There is a deeper problem. The Queensland Government Statistician's Office — independent — found that the decade-long surge in recorded crime used to justify this policy was driven largely by changes in how crime was recorded. Not more crime. Different counting. The crisis that built the political case for these laws was, in significant part, a statistical artefact.

They changed the smoke detector and are claiming credit for the silence.

The ABS's own 2024 data, using consistent national methodology, shows assault victims in Queensland increased by five per cent. Sexual assault reached its highest recorded number in thirty-two years. Neither figure appeared in a ministerial press release.

The research is not ambiguous

Put the statistics aside. Look at what we actually know about incarcerating children.

Young people who are detained reoffend at rates equal to or higher than those who aren't. This is not contested. It is the consistent finding of decades of international research, summarised in a comprehensive review by The Sentencing Project. Incarceration damages education, employment, and long-term health. A 2024 longitudinal study found children who are detained show significantly worse mental and physical health as adults — including higher rates of depression and suicidality.

Research in forensic youth mental health estimates that more than 95 per cent of young people in the justice system are experiencing mental ill-health. Trauma. Neurodevelopmental conditions. Untreated illness. These are not character flaws. They are unmet needs that existed before the offence, and that incarceration makes worse.

The evidence has never said: lock more children up. It has consistently said the opposite.

Queensland's Youth Advocacy Centre said plainly that harsher penalties would not deter crime and would worsen reoffending. The Queensland Law Society called for investment in diversion over punishment. These are not fringe positions. This is the mainstream of youth justice research, globally and consistently.

Where the money actually went

The 2025-26 Queensland Budget commits $5.2 billion to community safety. $347.7 million goes directly to rolling out the tougher laws — police, courts, custody. The Department of Youth Justice's capital budget this year is $343.1 million, most of it detention infrastructure. Three new detention facilities are being built.

There is also $560 million for early intervention — spread over five years. It sounds meaningful. It isn't, relative to the custodial spend alongside it. And it flows through the same broken funding architecture that is hollowing out the community sector: competitive short-cycle grants, output-based compliance, contracts that end before the work can take hold.

You cannot build therapeutic relationships on a twelve-month contract. You cannot earn the trust of a traumatised young person and then tell them the program ended because the grant ran out.

What remains unfunded — in any sustained, structural way — is what the evidence actually supports. Mental health workers embedded in communities. Youth programs stable enough to build real relationships. Culturally grounded supports for First Nations young people, who are catastrophically overrepresented in detention, and for whom community-controlled care carries the strongest evidence base of all.

This is a choice

The government knows the research. Queensland's own Audit Office has reviewed it. Its own statisticians have flagged the data problems. Peak bodies have submitted it, year after year, in language that gets increasingly plain.

The response has been more detention, more charges, and falling numbers that don't mean what they say they mean.

The political logic is not hard to follow. Fear works. "Adult crime, adult time" fits on a corflute. A therapeutic community model does not. Prevention produces results that are slow and hard to attribute to any single minister. Detention produces a number you can announce before the next election.

The costs land elsewhere. On young people who come out of detention more damaged than when they went in. On communities absorbing them without the services to help. On sector workers running on empty, plugging gaps with funding that expires before the work is done.

This is not a failure of knowledge. It is a failure of political will. And naming it clearly — not as mismanagement, not as a funding gap, but as a deliberate choice made in the presence of contrary evidence — is the first condition of changing it.