Finally, Children's Minister Jenny Mikakos dropped the doublespeak.
For weeks, she and her department had been parroting the line – to anyone who listened – that "standard management of young people at the Grevillea unit does not involve 20 hours of lockdown per day".
It was a line striking in its obscurantism. Locking up children in solitary confinement for 20 hours a day at the Barwon maximum security adult prison could never be a "standard" way to manage them. But, according to multiple reports, they most certainly are locked up for 20 hours a day or more.
Ever since the Labor government announced three weeks ago it would send children from the troubled Parkville youth justice centre to Barwon, secrecy and doublespeak have been the order of the day.
The government re-named the Grevillea secure unit within Barwon a youth justice centre. It was, we were told, to house young offenders from Parkville, which had been damaged in riots, while fortification and repairs could be done.
Eventually, it emerged that children from Malmsbury and the Mill Park police station (also re-gazetted as a "youth justice centre") were being sent there, too.
The Department of Health and Human Services repeatedly said that young people held at the Grevillea unit within Barwon would "have access" to a "similar range" of education programs and services to those available at Parkville and Malmsbury.
Their lawyers report that while those services may be available sometime in the future, none of the children held at Barwon has yet had any classes or services in custody.
Instead, as human rights lawyer Ruth Barson described in an evocative Fairfax column last week, children have been held in solitary confinement. She described kneeling on the floor to speak to her client through a steel opening in the front of his cell. This is how lawyers must now advise their clients in Victoria?
While lawyers report that children are being held alone in their cells for most of the day, for weeks all the department would say was that "standard management" of juvenile detainees did not involve 20-hour lockdowns.
But on Wednesday, Ms Mikakos finally acknowledged that children had been subjected to lockdowns and isolation at Barwon.
"I have not previously asserted that lockdowns and isolations are not used in youth justice centres," Ms Mikakos said in a written response provided to questions asked by Nina Springle, Greens spokeswoman for children and families.
"The use of lockdowns and isolations are operational decisions made by my department. It is sometimes necessary for young people to be isolated or for youth justice units to be locked down due to imminent security or safety risks to themselves, others or the security of the centre."
What Ms Mikakos did not say was whether each and every child at Barwon had posed an imminent risk to themselves or others, or whether the use of widespread lockdowns of teenagers for more than 20 hours a day was somehow for the "security" of the maximum-security prison.
While the government has often couched the truth of what is happening at Barwon in bureaucratic language, precision does matter.
Any public discussion of youth justice that describe these young people as "children" is often met with torrents of anger by those who argue that describing young offenders as "children" devalues the effects of their alleged crimes.
But the decision to call them "children" is quite deliberate.
As minors, they are subject to the Children, Youth and Families Act.
Because they are children, their detention is the responsibility of the Department of Health and Human Services – unlike adult prisoners, who come under the jurisdiction of Corrections.
Because of their age, authorities recognise that children need to be treated differently to hardened, adult criminals – even if they have lengthy criminal records themselves.
This isn't just touchy-feely social worker stuff.
According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, children are more likely to "grow out" of offending than adult offenders, and become more law-abiding the more they mature.
The AIC adds: "A sentence in prison may entrench a criminal mindset and set a path for an adult life of crime."
Because of this, there are important protections for children caught up in the justice system: the media must not name them, to avoid publicly tarring them as a criminal when many will simply outgrow their criminal behaviour.
Despite the hysteria whipped up on the issue recently, there simply is no youth crime crisis in Victoria.
What there is, is a public confidence crisis.
As the Crime Statistics Agency (which takes its figures from Victoria Police) has shown, youth crime rates continue to fall. That is, both the number of offences and the number of offenders are down.
But this hasn't stopped widening alarm about youth crime gripping the state, and infecting the government, as it tries to ward off perceptions it's "weak" on crime.
Fairfax revealed last week that a "hardcore" group of as few as 180 young offenders could be responsible for almost one in four crimes committed by children.
If this is the case, surely it would be a better use of the state's time and resources to actively target these children with programs and services, to try to address the underlying causes of their offending.
On Monday, the Victorian government is due to defend a legal challenge to the legality of detaining children at Barwon prison. Much will depend on the result.
Bianca Hall is legal affairs reporter for The Age.