The Director of Oberstown Children's Detention Campus, Damien Hernon, has called on early intervention when it comes to tackling youth offending.
Mr Hernon's comments come amid a week of scrutiny of young people who have been engaging in criminal activity.
Speaking about this on RTÉ, Mr Hernon said: "our demographic is pretty typical, the characteristics are typical of the young people who come in ... recreational drug users, absent parents, non-school attendance".
Mr Hernon told the broadcaster that the practice of detention as a last resort for the shortest time possible, is important when it comes to reducing offending rates in the future.
"I meet with the president of the district court regularly and he will tell you they go to extreme lengths to try and keep young people out of detention, because if we accept that someone comes into detention at 14 years of age, the chances are they have a much higher chance then that they're going to be in detention throughout their teenage years into adult life", he said.
He also accepted that serious offences committed by young people has increased hugely.
"Across recent years the tariff of offences has increased from sexually harmful behaviour to taking people's lives either through manslaughter or murder. It's a relatively new phenomenon, I suppose, across the last four or six years," he said. "That creates a certain set of challenges because of the complexity of behaviours associated with that".
"Oberstown has had to respond to that through a different set of measures, through our programme team, through our key working team, through what we call a placement planning process, which monitors where young people are at in terms of their behaviour and how they're moving along within their programme," he added. (All quotes in this piece according to RTÉ).
Elsewhere, Mr Hernon went on to call for the work-to-rule protest among Oberstown staff to come to an end, stating that industrial action can increase risk.
