Introduction by Croakey: The Victorian Government has been slammed for increasing spending on prisons as a result of its bail laws, which have increased the numbers of children, young people and adults held on remand.
“Prisons are not the answer to community safety. Investment in mental health, family violence, housing, community-based diversion programs alongside legal assistance” is needed, Nerita Waight, CEO of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service (VALS) said this week.
VALS said its youth legal practice, Balit Ngulu, has seen a 300 percent increase in young people being held on remand since June last year. “The evidence is undeniably clear that the earlier a young person becomes involved in the criminal legal system, the more likely they are to reoffend.”
Juliana Warner, President of the Law Council of Australia, this week called for a nationally coordinated approach – as recommended by National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds – to protect Australia’s children through coordinated reform of health, education, housing, social services, family, disability support, child protection and criminal justice systems.
“Treating children who break the law in the same way we treat adults does not make our community safer,” she wrote in The Canberra Times.
Meanwhile, Northern Territory Opposition Leader Selena Uibo said the CLP Government’s first budget this week, with its increased spending on prisons and NT Police, provides a “bleak” vision for the Territory’s future.
“Territorians want to see people who do the wrong thing face consequences, but community safety is much more than just the short-term, Band-Aid solutions or quick fixes that put more people on a path to criminalisation and reoffending,” Uibo said.
Below, Tabitha Lean and Debbie Kilroy OAM, two of the founding members of the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, call for an end to policies that criminalise poverty, homelessness, mental health and substance use, and which are harming women, especially Aboriginal women.
Rather than expanding prisons, they say governments must invest in housing, healthcare, community-based support, and culturally strong services led by Aboriginal women, and repeal punitive bail laws, and stop mandatory sentencing.
Tabitha Lean and Debbie Kilroy write:
Across Australia, prisons are bursting at the seams. But instead of asking why we are locking up more people than ever before, governments are responding with the only tool they seem to understand: expansion.
This is not a prison overcrowding crisis – it is a mass imprisonment crisis. Aboriginal people, particularly women, are bearing the brunt.
In South Australia, we have heard that the crisis has reached such a boiling point that women are being sent to Mount Gambier Prison – a private prison managed by G4S, designed for men.
This move is deeply alarming. Not only does it place women in a facility not designed or built for them, but it sets a dangerous precedent: when the system fails, the solution becomes further compromise of safety and dignity, instead of meaningful transformation or innovation.
This stopgap measure isn’t just unsafe – it’s part of a much larger problem.
Rather than addressing why so many women are being imprisoned in the first place, the South Australian Government is boasting its largest prison spend in the state’s history, which includes a 40-bed expansion of the Adelaide Women’s Prison.
We cannot keep building our way out of this. Adding more beds does nothing to address the root causes of women’s imprisonment. It only ensures that more women, particularly Aboriginal women, will be locked away.
We are now seeing the gross expansion of the prison estate across jurisdictions.
In Victoria, the government has earmarked $727 million in the state budget to increase the number of adult prison beds by 1,000 and youth justice beds by 88.
This announcement follows recent bail law changes that have led to more people – particularly those awaiting trial – being jailed.
Rather than addressing the social conditions driving imprisonment, the Victorian Government is investing in concrete and cages. The logic is clear: legislate more people into prison, then build the infrastructure to hold them. It is a deliberate strategy of carceral growth that ignores decades of evidence showing this approach does not deliver community safety – it only deepens harm.
This carceral logic is being replicated across the country.
We should not be using overcrowding as an excuse to build more cages. We should be investing in decarceration strategies and asking hard questions about why women – most often criminalised because of racism, poverty, violence, homelessness, and systemic neglect – are ending up in prison in the first place.
There is always a prison bed, but never a house. Never a refuge. Never a counsellor. Never a path to healing.
Political decisions
These prison numbers are not just rising because of individual decisions. They are rising because of political ones.
The tightening of bail laws across multiple jurisdictions has driven more women – particularly women on remand – into prisons.
In many states, bail is now effectively denied to people who are homeless, living with disability, or surviving violence. Women are being imprisoned not because they pose a danger, but because they are poor or lack stable housing. This is not justice. This is punishment for being in pain.
In Perth, the cruelty of this crisis is playing out in other ways. Visits between incarcerated mothers and their children are being cancelled – not because of COVID-19 or security concerns, but due to lack of staff.
The Department of Communities, which facilitates visits for children in care, is bringing children in to visit their parents; however, we are told that on arrival the visits are cancelled due to the prison not being able to provide the workforce to ensure that kids can see their mums. This is the cost of mass incarceration: severed families, broken bonds, and intergenerational harm.
As formerly incarcerated women, we know how critical it is to maintain a relationship with our children. We know how heartbroken the mothers will be right now, pining for their babies. And we also know how devastating this will be for the children – being cut off from their mothers, from love, from connection. It is not just cruel, it is traumatising.
In the Northern Territory, the situation is nothing short of a human rights emergency. The overcrowding is so severe that women are reportedly sleeping on the floor on thin sheets, with no beds available.
The Alice Springs Correctional Centre, built to hold 500 people, is currently imprisoning over 800. In Darwin, 1,437 people are being held in a prison designed for just over 1,000. The total prison population in the NT now sits at 2,835 – a staggering figure for such a small jurisdiction.
Women in Darwin are raising the alarm about chronic overcrowding, inoperable air conditioning, and dangerously poor living conditions.
Many are cut off from family and community, denied visits, and unable to access programs or basic support. Separated from Country, women are being warehoused in oppressive conditions that amount to systemic abuse.
The result is widespread unrest, violence, and mass breaches of human rights – conditions that would spark national outcry in any other setting.
Real action needed
As members of the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, we – Debbie and Tabitha – have experienced this crisis firsthand.
Our planned visits to meet with women inside the Darwin and Perth prisons were both cancelled at the last minute due to staff shortages.
Despite prisons bursting at the seams, the systems expanding them cannot recruit staff fast enough to manage the increased population – nor can they retain the staff they already have. The result is a collapsing system, where even basic rights like visits, programs, and safe conditions are treated as optional extras.
Chairperson of the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency, Theresa Roe, recently said: “The time for empty promises is over. Real action is needed now. Without real change, our people will continue to suffer, and the justice system will continue to limp towards complete failure.”
This is not accidental. It is a direct consequence of policy choices that criminalise poverty, homelessness, mental health, substance use, and survival. It is the result of governments ignoring decades of evidence that prisons are violent and harmful – especially for women – and it is hitting Aboriginal women hardest.
Across the country, Aboriginal women are the fastest growing prison population. Many are mothers, carers, victims of violence, and women already targeted harshly by every other system.
If we want to address overcrowding, we need to stop filling the prisons. That means investing in housing, healthcare, community-based support, and culturally strong services led by Aboriginal women.
It means repealing punitive bail laws, ending mandatory sentencing, and shifting funding away from prison expansion and toward real safety. Safety that looks like homes, not handcuffs.
There is another way forward. But it will take courage – not concrete.
About the authors
Tabitha Lean is an activist, poet and storyteller. An abolition activist determined to disrupt the colonial project and abolish the prison industrial complex, she’s filled with rage, channelling every bit of that anger towards challenging the colonial carceral state. Having spent almost two years in Adelaide Women’s Prison, 18 months on Home Detention and three years on parole, Tabitha uses her lived prison experience to argue that the criminal punishment system is a brutal and too often deadly colonial frontier for her people. She believes that until we abolish the system and redefine community, health, safety and justice; her people will not be safe.
Debbie Kilroy OAM was first criminalised at the age of 13 and spent over two decades in and out of women’s and children’s prisons. Driven to end the criminalisation and imprisonment of girls and women, Debbie established Sisters Inside, as well as her law firm, Kilroy & Callaghan Lawyers. An unapologetic abolitionist, Debbie’s activism work centres on dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex and all forms of carceral control and exile. With a firm belief that there should be ‘nothing about us without us’, Debbie established the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls to centre the voices, experiences and aspirations of criminalisation and imprisonment women and girls in order to change the face of justice in this country.
The National Network was established in 2020 to represent people who have been in prisons and to advocate for abolition of the prison industrial complex.
Support services
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See Croakey’s archive of articles on human rights.
