Earlier this year I was taken to visit Maitland Gaol. The ex-prisoner who showed us around said that on his first day in adult prison, he looked around and saw many of his old companions from the boy's home he'd grown up in.

Many of the hundreds of thousands of young people who were institutionalised never received an education, but were used as cheap labour. Many drifted into the prison system as adults, and many have never found their families.