Prisons don’t create safer communities, so why is Australia spending billions on building them?

Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show prisoner numbers are growing in every Australian state and territory — except Victoria.

Nationally, our per capita imprisonment rate outpaces Canada, the United Kingdom and all of Western Europe. Annual operating and capital costs for the nation’s prisons have surpassed A$6 billion annually — more than double what they were a decade ago.

As of January, the Northern Territory hit a grim milestone. More than 1% of the territory’s total population is now incarcerated in adult prison. This is the first time this has happened in any Australian jurisdiction.

Incarceration is a “common sense” policy in Australia, despite fuelling cycles of intergenerational poverty, trauma, social exclusion and criminalisation.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Instead of governments racing to incarcerate, they could be investing in the social support systems that are needed to curb the prison crisis.

More people are behind bars than ever

After falling from heights during the convict era, incarceration rates were relatively stable in Australia for decades from the 1920s.

But since the 1980s, imprisonment rates in every state and territory have increased, though in Victoria, the rate has been dropping since 2020.

Nationally, 0.07% of Australians were incarcerated in adult prisons in 1980. Today, that rate has more than doubled to 0.16%.

Due to population growth, these rates disguise the absolute number of prisoners. In 1980, just over 10,000 Australians were incarcerated.

In 2024, prison cells swelled with 44,400 people.

This isn’t because crime is worse. The rate of murder and manslaughter — the most reliable long-term indicator of crime — has almost halved.

In 1993, there were 1.9 homicides per 100,000 Australians. In 2023, there was one homicide per 100,000 people.

For the most part, governments imprison more Australians because of changes to criminal law and policy. These include making bail harder to access or increasing the length of prison sentences.

One estimate suggests 77% of the increase in imprisonment in Australia since 1985 can be accounted for by these two factors alone.

Governments could temper the punitive turn by reversing these changes and pursuing evidence-based alternatives to imprisonment, such as place-based initiatives that are led by First Nations communities.

Instead, governments are leading massive new prison construction projects.

The prison boom

Our calculations show that since 2000, 37 new prisons were built in Australia, with a combined capacity for 14,071 people. Many of these new prisons replace older facilities that were located in major city centres.

A rapid appreciation of land values and the high cost of maintaining 19th-century prisons led to their closure and redevelopment as boutique hotels, luxury housing and commercial hubs.

But the 14,071 tally doesn’t include extensions of existing facilities, which also boost capacity. Total prison design capacity has increased 2.4 times, from 20,503 in 1999–2000, to 49,880 in 2022–23.

In this time period, the amount of people behind bars nationally doubled, but many prisons aren’t full, showing this construction activity created thousands of empty cells nationwide.

Increasingly, giant new prisons are being planned and sited in urban peripheries and regional areas facing industrial and agricultural decline. They are “sold” to local communities as engines of economic growth and sustainable employment.

But this is a misleading portrayal of prison developments and their social and economic impacts.

For example, built at a cost of $1.1 billion, the maximum-security Western Plains Correctional Centre near Geelong has sat empty for the past two years. This is largely thanks to a declining prison population in Victoria.

And in Grafton in New South Wales, the privately run Clarence Correctional Centre, now Australia’s largest, has struggled to recruit employees and maintain its workforce due to low pay and reports of poor and unsafe working conditions.

International evidence on the local impacts of prison-building is mixed.

In the United States, prisons have often deepened poverty in the communities where they are built and discouraged other forms of local investment.

While decisions about new prison infrastructure are made at state and territory levels, this is a national story of prison expansion.

Prisons don’t create safety

Decades of prison expansion have created an immense burden on public spending but have not reduced recidivism rates.

In Australia, 42% of people released from prison will return within two years. Three in five adult prisoners have been incarcerated at least once before.

Research suggests the experience of imprisonment has, at best, no effect on the rate of reoffending. At worst, it can result in a greater rate of recidivism.

The failure of prisons to deter reoffending can be explained, in part, by the labelling effect of imprisonment. This is when the stigma of being branded a criminal begets further social exclusion.

Prisoners are overwhelmingly drawn from the most disadvantaged sectors of society. The prison experience can entrench these disadvantages. This happens through institutionalisation, when confinement becomes normalised and prevents someone building a life “on the outside”.

Imprisonment also disrupts social relations and can lead to criminal record discrimination upon release.

These effects are particularly acute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who are subjected to one of the highest rates of policing and incarceration in the world.

Read more: First Nations imprisonment is already at a record high. Unless government policy changes, it will only get worse

The hyper-incarceration of First Nations people reflects a long history of the use of imprisonment as a tool of colonial control. It results in more children being separated from their families, reduced access to housing, education and health care.

It also increases exposure to dangerous conditions, negligence and police violence, often leading to premature death.

First Nations people represent an ever-growing proportion of the prison population. Despite every government in Australia promising in 2020 to lower their Indigenous incarceration rate, the Productivity Commission reports this has only happened in Victoria and the ACT.

Meanwhile, Indigenous and other community organisations demanding and creating alternatives and wraparound support systems for formerly imprisoned people are chronically underfunded.

What is to be done?

Prison expansion in Australia isn’t inevitable. It’s a product of bad policy choices.

Other nations, such as the Netherlands, are showing that decarceration is not only possible, but has broad economic and societal benefits, including a reduction in crime rates.

After long-fought campaigns, even California has witnessed recent prison closures.

Prisoner release programs across several countries during the early stages of the COVID pandemic demonstrated the unnecessary size of prison populations.

Meanwhile, Australian states are rethinking their reliance on for-profit prison operations agreements, which has led to the nation having the highest rate of privatised incarceration globally.

Instead of falsely positioning prisons as economic panaceas and buying into the myth that they create safety through punishment and exclusion, the evidence shows governments need to enact new policies and direct funding towards the infrastructure that strengthens communities and enhances security for all: housing, health care, education, healthy environments and sustainable employment opportunities.