The Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services is not a regulator. It cannot fine the Department of Justice, close a prison or order anyone to change anything. What it can do is go in: to every prison, youth detention centre and court custody centre in Western Australia, at any time, with "free and unfettered access" to people, staff and records. It reports what it finds directly to Parliament. It runs on about $4.2 million a year and 19 staff (Annual Report 2024-25, pp 36, 56).
On the evidence, it does that job well, and it says what it sees.
It uses its strongest power
The law gives the Inspector one formal lever beyond publishing: a show cause notice. If the Inspector suspects a serious risk to people in custody, or that they are being subjected to "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment", the Department must show why the matter should not be referred to the Minister (Inspector of Custodial Services Act 2003, s 33A).
The Inspector has used it four times since 2017, three times with a referral to the Minister, each time on grounds that included suspected degrading or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In May 2024, after inspecting Hakea Prison, the Inspector formed the view that prisoners there were being held in conditions that were cruel, inhuman or degrading: regular lockdowns caused by daily staff shortages, meals eaten in cells beside the toilet, and the evening meal served between 3 and 4pm, "meaning they are required to go almost 15 hours between dinner and breakfast" (Annual Report 2023-24, p 37).
In March 2026 the Inspector did it again, this time for Hakea, Casuarina and Melaleuca together. "Almost two years after the Show Cause Notice was issued in respect of Hakea, conditions have not materially improved and, in fact, similar conditions are now evident in both Melaleuca and Casuarina" (Show Cause Notice report, 2026, p v). The adult prison population had grown 37% between January 2023 and February 2026, with up to 200 people sleeping on mattresses on the floor (p iv).
Many bodies Regulator Review has examined leave their strongest powers unused. This one does not.
What happens next is not up to the Inspector
The Department of Justice accepts most recommendations, 86% in 2024-25 (Annual Report 2024-25, p 50). But "accepted" includes "supported in principle", which the Department uses where there are "practical impediments", such as the need for more money. When the Inspector recommended in July 2025 that the government hold a formal inquiry into Hakea, the Department only "noted" it, saying the recommendation was directed to the government (Report 162, p iv). In April 2026 the Inspector wrote that neither that recommendation nor an earlier one for a cross-government taskforce had been implemented "to the size or scale necessary" (Show Cause Notice report, p v).
The Inspector has shown how hollow some acceptances are. A 2023 review of the Department's handling of coroners' recommendations on deaths in custody found it "frequently closed recommendations without full implementation". In 19 of 20 recent inspections where a date was recorded, the Department took longer than the five weeks it agreed to respond to a draft report (calc).
Those are the Department's failures. So is the state of youth detention. In 2023-24 the Inspector wrote that for more than ten years his office's reports had raised problems with how young people in detention were managed, and that "Publication of these issues ultimately did not lead to the systemic reforms necessary". He added: "We all must accept some level of responsibility for these outcomes, and I include myself in this" (Annual Report 2023-24, p 2). Few office holders write that about themselves.
The government has also left the office waiting. Western Australia designated it in 2019 to inspect police lock-ups under the UN torture prevention protocol. Seven years on there is no legislation and no money to do it (Annual Report 2024-25, p 24; Budget Statements 2026-27, p 466).
The three-year deadline
The Act is simple: "At least once every 3 years the Inspector is to inspect each" prison, detention centre, court custody centre and lock-up (s 19).
The Inspector's annual reports never say whether that happens. But every inspection report publishes its own key dates, including when the inspectors arrived. Regulator Review lined them up. Of 30 gaps between full inspections of the same facility since 2019, 12 ran past three years, nine of them by more than a month (calc). Roebourne went more than 3 years 8 months between inspections, and Wooroloo more than 3 years 7 months (calc).
The longest is at Banksia Hill and Unit 18, the state's youth detention centres. They were last fully inspected in February 2023. The next inspection is scheduled for 23 November 2026, about nine and a half months past the three-year mark (calc). The Inspector's published plan for 2025-26 did not include them. They are not the only case: the yearly plans the Act requires left out Bandyup, Wooroloo, Roebourne and West Kimberley in the years each fell due (calc).
The office did not stop watching. It made 12 visits to the youth sites in 2023-24 and published a follow-up review in December 2024. Whether that counts as an inspection under the Act is arguable. The office has not argued it; it has not reported the gap at all.
Slow reports, and whose fault
The Inspector's annual reports have said since at least 2015-16 that an inspection takes "between six and nine months" to reach Parliament. The reports' own key dates say otherwise. For reports released between mid-2023 and mid-2025, the median time from the end of the inspection to public release was 12.7 months (calc). Bandyup took 16 months; the court custody centres, 17 (calc).
The Inspector's annual reports point to limited resources, the Department's slow responses and the law's 30-day embargo on tabled reports. All are real. But the largest delay was the office's own: a median of about eight months to send a draft to the Department at all (calc).
After an internal review of how it works, the office cut that to about five months, and recent reports have reached the public in about eight months. That is a genuine improvement.
Reporting on itself
The office is unusually open about its work. Every report is published with the Department's response to each recommendation. It is much less open about its own performance. It does not report against the three-year obligation. It does not measure whether its recommendations are implemented. It has not published a count of letters from prisoners and families since 2015-16, when it received 118. Its volunteer Independent Visitors raised over 1,100 issues in 2024-25 (Annual Report 2024-25, p 15); what became of them is not reported.
The grade
Regulator Review's proposed grade is B: the Inspector inspects every facility, reports plainly and uses its strongest power when the evidence calls for it, but it has let the statutory three-year cycle slip without saying so and has been slow to get its own reports to Parliament. The worst failures in WA custody over this period, overcrowding, lockdowns and the deaths of two young people in detention, belong to the Department of Justice and the government. The Inspector reported them. What would lower the grade is another missed cycle or a return to year-long reports. What would raise it is a public table of every facility's last and next inspection, and a count of what its recommendations actually changed.
The full analysis and sources are in the accompanying report.