Beyond the sentence: Why Australia’s justice system fails at the point of release

Examining Australia’s prison system through the lens of release and reintegration, the greatest failures in justice occur not inside custody, but at the point people return to society. Mainul Haque writes.

AS AN OFFICIAL VISITOR to correctional centres, I speak regularly with people in custody throughout their sentence, not only at the point of release. These conversations often reveal more about the justice system than any dataset or policy report.

One moment has stayed with me.

When I asked an inmate what he feared most about leaving prison, he did not hesitate. “Out there,” he said.

Not the prison itself, but the life waiting for him outside.

That response captures a structural issue in how Australia continues to approach justice. Public debate remains heavily focused on sentencing, incarceration and punishment. Far less attention is given to what happens after release, yet it is this transition that most strongly determines whether people stabilise or return to custody.

The scale of Australia’s prison system makes this imbalance impossible to ignore.

Australia's justice system still protects the wealthy

The inequality is starkest in criminal justice — the poor are still disproportionately incarcerated.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reports that as at 30 June 2025, there were 46,998 adult prisoners in Australia, an increase of 6% in a single year. The national imprisonment rate rose to 216 per 100,000 adults, the highest since 2019.

This is not a stable system. It is a system in motion.

Around 19,850 prisoners, or 42%, were unsentenced, meaning a large share of people in custody are not serving final sentences but are moving through remand and court processes. Over the past decade, this proportion has risen from about 31% to 42%, reinforcing a system increasingly defined by churn rather than resolution.

That churn is not evenly distributed across Australia.

New South Wales holds around 13,000 prisoners, Queensland about 11,000 and Western Australia just over 8,000, together accounting for the majority of the national prison population. By contrast, the Northern Territory has far fewer prisoners in absolute terms but records the highest imprisonment rate in the country, more than 800 per 100,000 adults.

In other words, incarceration in Australia is not only uneven in scale, but concentrated in particular jurisdictions and communities.

The demographic profile reveals further structural patterns.

The median age of prisoners is 36.6 years and around 92% are male.

More than four in five prisoners (83%) were born in Australia, while overseas-born prisoners account for around 14% of the prison population. Among overseas-born prisoners, the most common countries of birth are New Zealand (2% of total prisoners), the United Kingdom (1%) and Vietnam (1%).

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people remain profoundly overrepresented, accounting for 37% of the prison population despite representing around 3% of the Australian population.

This is not a marginal imbalance. It is a defining feature of the system.

Many prisoners also have low educational attainment, unstable housing histories, mental health conditions and prior contact with the justice system. These are not exceptions; they are common features of custodial populations. The ABS and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare both report that these forms of disadvantage are significantly overrepresented in prison populations compared to the general community.

The offence profile adds further clarity.

The ABS reports that the most common category is acts intended to cause injury (13,663 prisoners or 29%), followed by sexual assault and related offences (7,764 or 17%) and illicit drug offences (5,209 or 11%).

Taken together, these figures describe a system shaped by violence, addiction and entrenched disadvantage interacting over time, rather than a narrow set of criminal behaviours.

Inside custody, structure exists in a way it often does not outside it. Daily routines are predictable. Basic stability is maintained.

As one person told me: “At least here, I know what tomorrow looks like.”

That statement goes to the heart of a deeper governance issue. Release is not a return to stability. It is often the sudden removal of structure without coordinated support.

I have met individuals leaving custody with no confirmed housing, delayed income support and fragmented access to health and employment services. Each system exists independently, but they do not operate together at the point of transition.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that post-release periods are associated with sharply increased risks of homelessness, unemployment, acute health deterioration, and a significantly elevated risk of death in the weeks following release, particularly linked to overdose and untreated medical conditions.

Morals versus ethics: Australia's flawed justice system

Our nation's justice system is in need of reform when children are being imprisoned and corporations are getting away with robbery.

Inside prison, systems are structured. Outside prison, they are fragmented.

Responsibility for reintegration is distributed across jurisdictions. States and territories manage corrections. The Commonwealth oversees income support and employment services. Housing sits across multiple levels of government. Health systems are similarly fragmented.

No single system is responsible for the transition itself.

In practice, reintegration is not designed as a system. It is an accumulation of disconnected services that rarely align at the moment they are most needed.

Recent events in Alice Springs have drawn attention to these structural gaps in a confronting way. The death of a five-year-old Indigenous girl, referred to in public reporting as Kumanjayi Little Baby in accordance with cultural naming practices, has been widely reported in national media coverage of the circumstances surrounding the case.

While individual cases are always complex and must not be reduced to single explanations, they raise difficult policy questions about system coordination at critical transition points.

What might have been different if housing had been secured in advance, if income support had been activated immediately and if health and social services had been properly connected before release? In such circumstances, transition into the community begins with structure rather than uncertainty.

Reintegration is not a procedural endpoint. It is a high-risk transition point where system failure routinely translates into preventable harm. When coordination breaks down, the consequences do not remain confined to the individual; they are carried by families, communities and already overburdened public systems.

Taken together, the evidence leads to an uncomfortable but unavoidable conclusion: the problem is not a lack of services, but the absence of a coherent, binding framework capable of integrating those services at the precise point where they determine outcomes.

Australia requires a nationally coordinated reintegration system jointly owned by the Commonwealth and the states, with enforceable accountability for outcomes including return to custody, housing stability, employment participation and continuity of health care after release.

Until such a framework exists, Australia will continue to operate a correctional system that is administratively competent in managing incarceration, but fundamentally failing in its stated objective of rehabilitation and social reintegration.

In doing so, we will continue to measure justice by institutional activity and throughput, rather than by whether people are genuinely supported to re-enter society and avoid returning to custody.

Mainul Haque OAM is an Official Visitor to correctional centres, a community advocate, former senior APS officer and ACT Multicultural Ambassador.