The West Australian, 23 January 2025
When it comes to putting people in prison, Western Australia is breaking records left, right and centre.
In the last financial year, the adult prison population soared by 15% to reach a record high of 7,792 people living in prison around the state. By December, this record was smashed again as the prison population ballooned to nearly 8,000 people.
As a result, the prison system is under immense pressure with most prisons over capacity. Impacts of this overcrowding ripple throughout prison as well as the broader community.
Behind the prison gates, overcrowding leads to inhumane and degrading living conditions. Shared infrastructure is harder to maintain, adequate sanitation and nutrition are compromised. Space in cells is limited, particularly when cells designed for one person are squeezing in two or three beds.
Overcrowding leads to rolling lockdowns, with people confined to cells for extended periods with little to no time outdoors often for several days. Lockdowns also restrict access to family and friends outside prison, with visits cancelled and reduced access to phone calls. This exacerbates the harm to families who are already disconnected by incarceration, particularly for children with a parent or other family member living in prison.
Rehabilitation, education and health services are restricted by overcrowding, with external service providers not allowed into prisons during lockdowns. When programs do run, they may be oversubscribed and have wait lists. In the meantime, overcrowding causes distress, increasing the risk of self-harm and suicide, and the risk of violence toward people living and working in prisons.
For prison staff, overcrowding results in poor working conditions, and increased safety risks. This increases unplanned leave from work, exacerbating understaffing that has implications including further lockdowns, restrictions to services, and poorer work conditions – embedding a vicious cycle with ever worsening outcomes.
The impacts of overcrowding aren’t confined to the prison system. If people are not able to access adequate supports while in prison, the likelihood of reoffending on release increases significantly. Increased crime impacts the whole community, as does the ballooning cost of imprisonment for WA taxpayers.
The Inspector of Custodial Services has expressed his significant concerns about prison overcrowding by issuing a show cause notice to the Department of Justice and the Minister. The Department responded by announcing a plan to add 219 more beds.
Building more bed capacity is not the solution to this crisis. There is simply no evidence that imprisoning more people reduces crime. Instead, we need decisive action to drive the prison population down.
Policy settings that push more unsentenced men and women into custody are a key driver of prison overcrowding. The remand population (people who are unconvicted and therefore legally entitled to apresumption of innocence) increased by at least 25% between June 2023 and June 2024.
Similarly, many people who would be eligible for parole are not accessing it, often because they couldn’t complete programs that are a condition of their release. There was a significant decrease in the number of people receiving parole between 2023 and 2024.
Rather than more beds, a better immediate response to population pressures would be to release those people held on remand who will be unlikely to serve long sentences, and to facilitate an increase in parole approvals. This requires collaboration across justice and other sectors to ensure people can adhere to bail or parole conditions, like having suitable and stable accommodation or engaging with community-based support services.
In the medium to long-term, we need policymakers to recognise that the solutions to reducing crime are not found inside prison but in the community. We need real investment and hard work at the grassroots level with individuals, families, and communities to address the drivers of crime, and that is where the WA government should focus their efforts.
Over-incarceration is not a Corrections problem, it’s a whole of government problem.
As we approach the state election, the Justice Reform Initiative – a multipartisan alliance dedicated to evidence-based criminal justice policy - calls on all parties to acknowledge that the dramatic ongoing growth of the prison population is a harmful and expensive crisis.
It is time to establish a whole of government strategy to reduce incarceration, driven by a taskforce that includes representatives from the relevant government agencies, ministerial offices, and (very importantly) community sector and independent experts. The progress of this taskforce must be regularly published to ensure accountability and transparency.
System reform is vital to end the overcrowding crisis. A booming prison population is a record that WA should aim to lose.
Kimberley Wilde is WA Coordinator for the Justice Reform Initiative.