Behind Closed Walls

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following article contains the names and details of deceased people.

“I have not been given bottled water and have to drink the water from above the toilet. The water is warm or hot. This is disgusting and the sink is often filled with sick and other people’s saliva. The toilets are blocked and stink. (…) You can not get away from the smell.”

“When using my puffer I am meant to rinse my mouth after every use, I am sometimes not able to do this, as the only source of water [is] shared by up to 20 people between the three cell areas.”

These are the words of two Aboriginal women, Deanna and Simone, who submitted affidavits to the Alice Springs Local Court in February 2025. They were held as prisoners in the watch house of the local police station for multiple months. The cells in the watch house are small, designed to hold people for only a few nights while they are under temporary arrest. 

The prison system in the Northern Territory is broken: one in every hundred people in the Territory are in prison. Watch houses that are not fit-for-purpose are being used as overflow facilities. The newly elected Country Liberal Party’s policies will continue to worsen the crisis significantly. They have lowered the age of criminal responsibility to 10, made it more difficult to be granted bail, and given police more wide-ranging powers to enforce court orders. 

To deal with prison overcrowding, new laws are being introduced to make it easier to contract private and interstate guards. New prisons and work camps in Holtze and Katherine are being planned. Reducing the number of people who are incarcerated is not on the political agenda, only increasing the capacity of the system is. 

In Queensland, the number of children being held overnight in watch houses meant for adults increased by 50 per cent between 2022-3 and 2024-5. The New South Wales government has tightened bail laws for young people and limited the number of officials who can make bail decisions, meaning people will have to wait longer before they can be released. It appears to be the case that the competition to be the most ‘tough on crime’ will be an important feature of all Australian elections in the coming years.

Despite all this, many people forced to spend nights in conditions like those of the Alice Springs watch house have not been convicted of a crime at all; 40 per cent of prisoners in the country are awaiting a conviction or sentence. Increasingly, many of them, like Deanna and Simone, are women. Incarceration rates for women are at the highest that they have ever been, and are rising quickly. Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety estimates that 70-90 per cent of women in prisons are victim-survivors of family, domestic, or sexual violence.

As has been the case for more than half a century, Australian First Nations people are the most incarcerated group of people in the world. They are 17 times more likely than non-First Nations people to be in prison in Australia.

In many ways, our society is becoming fairer, more equal, and more humane. Our prison system is not; and that is despite the fact that it has been a recurring issue in Australian politics for decades. Why have a litany of Royal Commissions and law reform reports gone unheeded? Why has a harrowing series of tragedies not prompted change? Why has extensive media reporting on the broken state of Australian prisons not led to a corollary policy response?

The extent of discrimination and frequency of abuse in prisons in Australia is staggering, even when compared to countries like the United States. However, this is not inevitable. Being ‘soft on crime’ may be politically unpopular, but protecting human rights — especially of people who are unwell, unconvicted, young, or themselves victims of crime — need not be. It is easy to avoid thinking about what it actually means to send someone to jail, but it is imperative that we do. Without deep reflection on the state of our prison system and the way in which it has evolved, it is difficult to imagine reform occurring.

Although punishment in Australia plays a prominent role in our historical and political imagination, we have a selective memory. Children in primary schools are taught, in detail, about our convict past. They are taught that convict labour fueled the development of Australia’s agrarian economy in the first half of the 19th century. Often, they are even taught about the mistreatment of white convicts. For example, government approved school textbooks describe the use of harsh physical punishments, like public flailings and whippings, for convicts who refused to work or tried to escape.

In the 20th century though, our collective memory goes dark. Public punishments and open air prisons were replaced with the high walls of the modern penitentiary. The depictions of criminals serving their punishment that populated much of early Australian written and visual media disappear. It is not by chance that this coincided with a rapid increase in the Indigenous prison population. 

Since the publication of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in 1975, the way the modern prison system conceals physical, corporal punishment from the public eye has become well-studied. Visible punishments like public whippings created sympathy and admiration for convicts, and made the punisher, rather than the punished, appear as violent or primitive. Removing prisoners from populated areas and sequestering them in austere, walled environments created a scenario in which humanitarians and progressives supported horrific abuse as long as it was labelled as rehabilitation.

This is even more true in Australia, where the prison system has always been highly segregated by race and class. Roebourne Gaol, in the Pilbara region in Western Australia, had separate cells for ‘Natives’, ‘Whites’ and ‘Coloureds.’ Women, who are often invisible in the history of imprisonment, were given more meagre rations than men. Cells that housed women at Fremantle prison in the 1970s were declared to be “much too small for accommodating any males.” 

The records of prisoners’ experiences that do survive are nearly entirely white and male. As historian Mark Finnane put it, “there remains a long period (c 1900-1960) when the administration and the experience of Aboriginal imprisonment is little known.” 

Even in general, there are very few popular historical works that re-narrate Australian history from a First Nations perspective. Equivalent works from other countries, like the New York Times’s The 1619 Project, which centres slavery and racism as the dominant organising forces of American history, benefited from there being far more archival material to draw on in the United States than there is in Australia.

For example, the idea that the mass incarceration of African Americans in the United States was driven by the attempts of Southern state governments and businesses to substitute the labour of enslaved peoples with that of prisoners is an increasingly popular and politically powerful one. Shane Bauer’s American Prison, a book that argues for this thesis, was bought widely, and was cited by both Barack Obama and the New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of 2018. 

Of course, it is true that slavery and forced labour played a comparatively more significant role in the history of the United States prison system than in Australia. However, the link between slavery and prison in Australia is important and rarely discussed. There is a reason that states with lower white convict populations like South and Western Australia imprisoned more Indigenous Australians earlier in time.
For example, Rottnest Island, off the coast of Perth, was the site of a prison and forced labour camp where Indigenous Australians were held. Over the period between 1838 and 1931, one in every ten prisoners that were imprisoned there died, some as a result of disease outbreaks, some as a result of torture or summary execution. Mostly, prisoners were sent to the island when they refused to partake in forced labour elsewhere in Western Australia. A series of “Protection” or “Welfare” acts in the state enslaved Aboriginal people in the pearling industry, on farms, or as domestic servants. According to historian Neville Green, those who refused to work elsewhere were sent to Rottnest, forced to quarry salt and limestone, where the punishments for non-compliance were brutal. Western Australian Governor Arthur Kennedy himself explained that, partly, the logic of the island prison was that without it, people in Perth would see Indigenous prisoners “chained and manacled in the most inhumane manner.” The institutionalised racial segregation in the prison system had the convenient effect of foreclosing any sympathy that white, urban populations may have had for enslaved Aboriginal people.

The gratuitous, violent, and psychologically abusive treatment of Aboriginal people in custody has never stopped. It has been facilitated by enduring colonial logic and attitudes amongst those who organise and work in Australian prisons. John Roy Stephenson, a man who worked in Australian prisons between 1930 and 1970, wrote a memoir recounting his experiences. Many of the interactions described in the book reveal the satisfaction he felt in exercising unchecked power over Aboriginal prisoners at the Stuart Creek Prison in Townsville. Having unilaterally and summarily convicted a group of prisoners of their third minor offences committed in custody, Stephenson took delight in informing them that the punishment would be an additional fourteen months of hard labour, and that, under the Queensland Prisons Act, they had no right to appeal the decision that he had made. In his own words, the subsequent resentment the prisoners felt towards him “pleased [him] mightily.”

Why has our prison system been so unaffected by progressive thinking that has, in many other ways, changed our society for the better? It is true that much of the prison reform that is needed in Australia may not be politically palatable. However there exist many policy changes that would still be both popular, and make the lives of prisoners better. Ahead of both the 2008 and 2012 elections, Obama endorsed certain popular, reformist criminal justice policies, like reducing the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offences. The so-called “smart on crime” policies that Eric Holder’s Department of Justice implemented in 2013 were widely supported. They included expanding compassionate releases and moderating sentencing guidelines for minor drug crimes. Perhaps an equivalent Australian policy would be abolishing our privately run prisons.

Most Australians consider private prisons to be a uniquely American phenomenon, however, it is Australia that has the most privatised prison system in the world. In 2018, 18 per cent of prisoners in Australia were held in private prisons, compared to only 8 per cent of prisoners in the US. The largest prison in Australia is the Clarence Correctional Centre in Grafton. It is owned and operated by Serco, a British multinational defence, health, and criminal justice contractor, listed on the London Stock Exchange. 

Private prisons have not been a political flashpoint in Australia, but polling suggests that a large majority of Americans oppose the privatisation of prisons. It is hard to imagine the same would not be true here, especially given that most of our private prisons are run by foreign companies. Private prisons are also more expensive for the taxpayer: Serco has previously been embroiled in controversy for overcharging the British government for criminal justice services. In addition, private prison operators are shielded from public accountability. Large portions of the contracts between them and state governments are redacted. In the United States, many of those contracts include ‘occupancy guarantee’ clauses, whereby governments are required to pay fees to prison operators if the inmate population falls below a certain number. It is unlikely that arrangements like that exist in Australia; but even if they did, we would not know about them.

What we do know, though, is that, according to a 2018 report produced by Queensland’s Crime and Corruption Commission, there is comparatively more violence and corruption in private prisons than public. Anecdotally, prisoners report that commissary goods are more expensive in private prisons, visiting hours or phone calls are harder to arrange, and complaints fall on deaf ears more often. 

Governments taking control back from private prison operators would likely be both politically popular and meaningfully improve the lives of 18 per cent of prisoners in Australia. Some states are starting to do this; the New South Wales government recently decided to not renew its contract with GEO Group Australia for the management of the Junee Correctional Centre. However, it needs to happen more quickly. There are other reforms of this nature, like giving prisoners basic workers’ rights or making the market for healthcare provision in prisons more competitive, that would not kill the election chances of a party supporting them.

The reason these reforms have not happened is a lack of empathy and consideration for prisoners. The history of prisons in Australia is one of turning a blind eye to the experiences and voices of those in them. Whether by entrapping them on an island or behind closed walls, the effect has been to dehumanise and abstract the lives of those we imprison. This problem continues today. Media reporting on prison usually takes the form of either: a) reporting on deaths in custody and serious incidents of abuse, which are often portrayed as aberrations; or b) reporting on high-level, abstracted policy issues like rising incarceration rates. These are both important and necessary forms of reporting that must continue. However, more attention should also be given to the frequent denial and violation of basic rights that happens daily in Australian prisons. For many prisoners, chronic pain, thoughts of self harm, and the threat of sexual violence are facts of life. By not describing these issues in plain terms, we allow them to continue. We allow many Australians to conceive of imprisonment as mostly humane and justified; as fulfilling its function of taking away certain freedoms in a precise and orderly manner in order to rehabilitate criminals and protect the rest of society. Realising that a sentence of imprisonment is a sentence to unchecked and horrific abuse is the first step to reform.

For example, 50 per cent of prisoners in Australia have a disability. According to a Human Rights Watch report, compared to prisoners without disabilities, they are more likely to be assaulted, and are more likely to be placed in solitary confinement. Many of them do not receive adequate healthcare. Their medications are often stolen by other prisoners, who sometimes force them to regurgitate tablets after they have taken them. Mentally ill prisoners are especially at risk. In Australia, forensic patients, who are deemed not fit to stand trial for criminal charges laid against them, are still often sent to prison. Other jurisdictions like New Zealand prohibit this, and rightly so: if someone is so unwell that we cannot hold their criminal actions against them, they are surely too unwell to be placed into one of the most distressing environments one could dream up. Often placed in solitary confinement for more than 22 hours a day, and faced with indeterminate wait times to access healthcare services outside of prison, many prisoners self harm or take their own life. Coronial inquests and royal commissions have regularly drawn attention to these problems, but little progress has been made. Prison guards are often former police, military, or security officers, and do not have remotely enough training to deal with mentally ill inmates. Prisoners speaking to Human Rights Watch recounted how they were ignored and abused by guards while in solitary confinement. “I was sobbing, they didn’t respond. They opened up the grate [in the cell door] and laughed at me. I swallowed batteries in front of them,” one said.

There is also a crisis of sexual assault and violence in Australian prisons. It is chronically underreported in the media, and difficult to research. A study conducted by advocate and lawyer David Heilpern in 1998 estimated that roughly a quarter of prisoners in the country had been sexually assaulted in prison. Young and gay prisoners are especially at risk, and many victims will contract sexually transmitted diseases. When people in Australia are sentenced to imprisonment, much of the time, they are being condemned to the lifelong trauma, paranoia, dissociation, and amnesia associated with being the victim of rape.

In 1991, then New South Wales Minister for Corrective Services Michael Yabsley commented that prison rape was both “inevitable” and a useful “detterant factor” against offending. Despite much public outrage over the comments at the time, no substantive reforms have been made since then to reduce sexual violence in prisons. In the United States there is the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, which established a “National Prison Rape Reduction Commission” aimed at increasing support for prisoners, reporting of assaults, and awareness of the issue. There is no state or federal equivalent policy in Australia.

Our national ignorance of prison is shameful. State governments are in the process of sending even more people, including many children, to jail. In some places in Australia, more than one in every hundred people are in prison. We have an obligation to understand what that actually means, to listen to the stories of prisoners, and to broadcast their experiences. We must reckon with the fact that human beings in prison are subjected to the most deplorable crimes every day and that most of the time, no one cares or intervenes. If voters and politicians are intent on incarceration being the panacea for our many social maladies, then they should at least be honest about its consequences.