A Queensland criminologist says detention shouldn’t be a last resort for  “hardcore” teen offenders.

Bond University criminologist Dr Terry Goldsworthy was also critical of the removal of the breach of bail offence for youth.

It follows a spate of youth crime in Queensland in recent weeks including a number of teens nabbed by police in dramatic fashion on the Gold Coast yesterday.

“The breach of bail offence for children [was] removed by the current government in 2015, so you can now have a child who gets bail, breaches it, and then goes back … and there’s no punishment for the breach itself,” he told Neil Breen.

“That’s one of the issues I am speaking to, we need to bring that back.

“There needs to be consequences for children who don’t do right thing.

“We are not talking about first time offenders here, we are talking about that 10 per cent who commit 44 per cent of the crime, the hardcore of juvenile offenders who are already criminalised.

“We need to break the cycle, we need to put them in detention, we can’t have a policy of detention of youth being the last resort.”

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