Each edition contains news articles and investigative pieces. These are topical stories that are usually about prisons and criminal justice.
We also summarise the latest criminal justice news around the country.
In nearly every Australian state and territory, there are thousands of people facing prison time due to unpaid fines.
Including a Corrections Minister stepping down in WA, inmates helping raise orphaned lambs in NSW, mandatory sentencing for gun theft in TAS and more.
Welcome to Coronial Corner, where we chat the coroners’ courts and what they say about preventable deaths in custody and the broader system.
In prison, time is both punishment and currency. It is counted in courtrooms, crossed off calendars and measured against the possibility of release.
On an average night, there are about 900 children in youth detention around the country.
Long wait times to access rehabilitation and wellness programs and a lack of even basic pre-release support is contributing to high recidivism rates in Queensland, the state’s Auditor-General has found.
A successful Australia-first drug and alcohol rehabilitation program in a WA prison will soon shut down due to overcrowding.
The state government introduced legislation to Parliament last week that allows for people in prison’s legal right of one hour in the open air every day to be limited due to a range of reasons.
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A man was unlawfully kept in a South Australian prison for months after his release date due to a “systems error”, and was not told about this for five years, an Ombudsman investigation has found.
A support service transporting First Nations people from prison to treatment facilities will shut down after it ran out of funding.
The Adelaide Remand Centre will remain a privately-run prison after the South Australian government brushed aside criticisms to renew the contract with Serco for five years.
The Victorian government will spend $229 million on new prison beds, five times what it has allocated to programs aiming to keep people out of them.
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There are a number of groups around the country that inspect prisons and provide feedback and recommendations to governments. These often involve visiting prisons and talking directly to people in custody.
The Women’s Advocacy Service is a partnership between Legal Aid NSW and the Aboriginal Legal Service (NSW/ACT), providing face-to-face appointments with both a lawyer and a social worker.
The men at Fremantle Prison learnt how to grow fresh food by planting concentrated rows of sturdy cabbage, corn, carrots, spring onions and other edible plants that could withstand the harsh WA sun. At its peak, the garden supplied the prison kitchen with more than 10,000 kilograms of fruit and vegetables each year.
The Inspector of Detention Services Queensland is undertaking a review of Maximum Security Units (MSUs) at Arthur Gorrie, Brisbane and Woodford Correctional Centres.
Including the prison population growing in the ACT, a drug bust during a prison visit in Victoria, Hakea inmates suing state government in WA and more.
With Mother’s Day this month, prison visits have never been more important. But for children with a parent in prison, or other loved ones, this process can be scary and intimidating, with a lot of rules and conditions.
Australia’s biggest prison is so “grossly understaffed” in mental health services that people with acute needs should not be held there, the NSW prison inspector has found.
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