An interim parliamentary report into children in prison has failed to recommend sweeping changes, despite the "significant and disturbing evidence" received from a large number of experts.

The Senate inquiry into Australia's youth justice and incarceration system recommended the Senate "continues to pursue an inquiry into the incarceration of children in Australia".

Furthermore, it called on the Senate to consider whether to refer to the committee an inquiry into the system concerning the Commonwealth's responsibilities relating to the disproportionate incarceration of First Nations children and the compliance with international obligations relating to the detention of children.

Despite a significant number of experts recommending raising the age of criminal responsibility and for greater pressure to be put on different jurisdictions around protecting children, none have so far been forthcoming.

The inquiry was set up in the wake of the second young person to die in youth custody in WA in less than a year, with over hundred organisations and experts calling for changes to systems across the country.

In October 2023, 16-year-old Cleveland Dodd took his own life in the Unit 18 youth detention facility at Perth's Casuarina Prison.

The Aboriginal teenager was the first child to die in custody in Australia in more than a decade, and the first in WA history.

"In what other first world country, do we see children dying in custody?" Jacqueline McGowan-Jones, WA's Commissioner for Children and Young People, asked the committee earlier this month.

"In what first world nation do we think it's reasonable that we detain children in cells for up to 23 hours a day, that we leave them in great need, and they die in a system that should be protecting them."

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National Children's Commissioner, Anne Hollonds, said the system was in dire straits, noting children in Queensland had been given tents when leaving detention due to a lack of housing.

She told the press last year several politicians had told her nothing would change in youth detention as there are "no votes in children".

In dissenting comments to the interim report, Independent Senator Lidia Thorpe said the inquiry had only heard what "Elders, communities, advocates, and international bodies" have long been saying: "The criminalisation and detention of children in Australia is a crime scene and a human rights catastrophe that disproportionately impacts First Nations children."

"Detention centres are sites of systemic child abuse, operating in direct violation of this country's domestic and international human rights obligations and all morality, with evidence of neglect, excessive force, trauma, sexual, psychological and physical abuse inflicted on children as young as 10," Ms Thorpe said.

National Indigenous Times has reported on a multitude of alleged abuses in several states and territories on Indigenous children, including the death of two disabled Aboriginal boys in the wake of being housed in solitary confinement in Queensland for a combined 600 days.

Ms Thorpe argued the federal government needed to do more and was shirking its responsibility to look after children.

"The ongoing delays, inquiries, and political deflections do nothing but uphold the very conditions of harm that First Nations communities have resisted for generations," she said.

"Consecutive Australian governments have not just failed to act but are actively making the situation worse."

The federal government has regularly argued youth justice lies as a state responsibility, even if they have expressed disappointment in some actions enforced by different jurisdictions.

However, speaking before the inquiry, leading Indigenous barrister, Tony McAvoy SC, argued it was "not a question of if the commonwealth should act, but what it should do".

"The Commonwealth could legislate; the commonwealth could develop policy; the commonwealth could direct funding towards activities which promote and facilitate observation of Australia's international human rights obligations," he said.

Ms Thorpe pressed the Commonwealth to "urgently use all available legislative and policy levers to implement" change, including a national ban on all forms of torture and mistreatment - including spit hoods, and end the detention of children in adult facilities.

She also called for the adoption of all recommendations from the Bringing Them Home report; the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody; and the Help Way Earlier! Report.

In his comments, Senator David Shoebridge said it was near "universal agreement" that the system in its current form is "damaging children, endangering communities and must not continue".

He said the Commonwealth, as a party to the Treaty on the Rights of the Child and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, "has an obligation to ensure these rights are respected and complied with".

"Young people should be with their families and friends, in school and learning about the world," he said.

"Every child deserves this."