Youth advocates have criticised a $50 million election pledge by the Queensland opposition where "wayward" teens could be sent away to special "reset" programs.

Amid election campaigning, which has seen a heavy focus on youth crime, LNP leader David Crisafulli said nine early intervention centres will be set up across Queensland for troubled youths who require a higher level of care than community-based programs can provide.

He said the program would focus on "education, discipline, counselling … and above all, consequence for action" with young people being put through a program of "cognitive behavioural therapy".

"We must give these kids hope and help to turn towards a brighter future," he said.

The program would differ from the Newman-era bootcamp initiative as it would involve children and young people who have never been before the courts, but it didn't stop Queensland Premier Steven Miles linking the two on Tuesday.

"So, the LNP re-announced boot camps today, they were the failed policy that they introduced in 2012 and if they don't want to keep being compared to the government in 2012, they should stop looking like the government from 2012," Premier Miles said.

He said the program failed last time and would again, arguing it was all about a "crusade" into exploiting victims of crime for political benefit.

The plan was immediately criticised by youth and anti-prison advocates with Sisters Inside's Debbie Kilroy saying the suggestion that children who haven't been before the courts should be removed from their homes and families was "nothing short of outrageous".

"'The LNP is targeting our children based on what? Their race, their economic status, or their family connections?" Ms Kilroy said.

"These programs label children as 'high-risk' and they haven't even committed any crime, dragging them into a punitive system based on mere suspicion. This is not prevention—this is pre-emptive punishment that criminalises children for living in communities already marginalised and over-policed."

She said children being flagged because they were relatives of those in the system was "staggering," and risked creating another stolen generation of child removals.

On an average day in 2022-23 in Queensland, 310 children were in detention — 70 per cent of them Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander. A recent report found all three of the state's youth detention centres in 2022-23 were operating over their safe capacity by an average of 23 young offenders each day.

30 per cent live in unstable or otherwise unsuitable housing and 44 per cent have a disability.

Almost half of all Indigenous children in custody in Australia on an average day last year were in Queensland.

Speaking to Guardian Australia, chief executive of the youth advocacy centre, Katherine Hayes, argued children shouldn't be sent to a residential facility "against their will without the oversight of the courts".

Ms Hayes, who has been critical of the Miles' government and their suspensions of the human rights act to lock up children in adult watch houses, said the policy was susceptible to abuse.

"It is concerning to give the government the power to take away the liberty of a child in circumstances where they haven't committed a crime other than, for example, being the sibling of an offender. Without any judicial scrutiny, this is a complete overreach of government power," she told Guardian Australia.

"This is just boot camps by another name, and boot camps were found to be a complete waste of money when it was introduced by previous governments."

Earlier this year, a proposal by the federal opposition to crack down on "out of control" youth crime by banning social media use and sending children to outback camps has been criticised by Indigenous legal groups as "laughable".

"It would increase crime and widen the gap. Everyone would lose," the chair of National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services, Karly Warner, said at the time.

"The evidence shows that locking children up only leads to more crime. Children's prisons are breeding grounds for trauma, anger, and learning more serious criminal behaviours.

National Indigenous Times has reported on multiple incidents and issues in Queensland's youth justice system.

These include children being forced to plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit in order to avoid spending time in adult facilities, and two intellectually disabled Aboriginal teenagers dying in the wake of spending significant swathes of time in isolation in youth detention.

The Queensland election is on October 26, with Mr Crisafulli pursuing an "adult crime, adult time" policy. He has argued that subjecting children - some as young as ten - to significant periods of time in prison will act as a deterrent and make the community safer.