Overcrowded cells break people — prison suicides linked to worsening mental illness and disrupted sleep are infrastructural failures, writes Gerry Georgatos.
AUSTRALIA'S ADULT PRISONER population has surpassed 44,403 as at 30 June 2024, growing by 6% from the previous year, including a 15 % increase in descendants of First Peoples — now 15,871 people, representing 36% of all inmates.
Of these, Western Australia accounts for 7,792 prisoners as of 30 June 2024 — a 15 % rise over 2023, largely driven by a sharp escalation in remand detainees.
Nationally, more than 41% of prisoners – some 18,036 individuals – remain on remand, an increase of 13% in one year. Though remand growth attracts frequent scrutiny, this is far from the sole driver. In Western Australia, the remand proportion has long grown faster than sentencing populations, especially among female First Peoples, compounding systemic disadvantage.
Within WA’s custodial network, 16 prisons, including at least one juvenile facility (Banksia Hill Youth Detention, and its offshoot of Unit 18 at Casuarina), cells are routinely overcrowded. Recently, up to four prisoners were documented crammed into a single cell. At Casuarina and Hakea prisons, a substantial number are forced to sleep on mattresses on the floor: 62 at Hakea, mostly remand prisoners awaiting court, and 17 at Casuarina in one recent parliamentary disclosure by the Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services.
The overcrowding crisis is not just spatial — it has cascading psychological, physiological and mental‑health consequences. Overcrowded conditions erode privacy, dignity, and rest. They heighten risks of violence and self‑harm. Dangerous environmental factors such as ligature points remain pervasive: a recent Guardian Australia investigation identified 57 deaths across Australia linked to unremoved ligature hazards. Western Australia, despite pursuing minimisation since 2005 alongside mental health service improvements, still faces systemic vulnerabilities The Guardian.
Excessive confinement correlates with elevated suicidality. Well beyond overcrowding, many prisons across Australia subject inmates – especially female First People – to repeated lockdowns. In Victoria, lockdowns due to staffing crises triggered seven suicide attempts in a month, disproportionately affecting First Nations women. WA is no stranger to similar chronic staffing and mental health crises, though fewer public accounts exist.
First Peoples continue to bear the brunt: Western Australia incarcerates First People juveniles at 78 per 10,000, compared with 37 per 10,000 in the United States. For adults, the rate of imprisonment rose from an age‑standardised 2,266 to 2,559 per 100,000 between 2023 and 2024, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Australia’s incarceration rates of its First Peoples now eclipse those of invader-borne-colonised nations worldwide.
Yet Australia remains deficient in statutory prisoner rights protections. The existing legislative frameworks – such as state-level Youth Offender Acts and Criminal Offender Acts – orient towards incarceration rather than genuine life transformation. Although organisations like the Australian Human Rights Commission affirm that prisoners retain basic rights under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), breaches are common, and formal complaint mechanisms are limited. Healthcare in prisons remains chronically unequal to community standards; official reviews describe a continuing human rights crisis for prisoners, despite policy intentions.
The 339 recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody included a key proposal – Recommendation 224 – for all states to enact Custody Notification Services (CNS): legal hotlines that ensure every person who has First Nations heritage brought into custody receives immediate legal and welfare support from the specialist CNS. By 2018, only NSW and ACT had legislated CNS; WA, while implementing informal services post‑2019, still lacks binding legislation and enforcement mechanisms. NSW underwrites the CNS with the 2005 Powers and Responsibilities Act. The Act caveats no testimony or charges can be procured prior to police ensuring the detainee has been put into contact with the CNS. I helped to broker and procure the CNS for WA, SA and the NT but sadly to date, none have the equivalent legislation of NSW.
Importantly, amidst the Royal Commission’s 339 recommendations, Recommendation 329 called on the following:
'...the National Standards Body comprising Ministers responsible for corrections throughout Australia [to] give consideration to the drafting and introduction of legislation embodying the Standard Guidelines and in drafting such legislation give consideration to prisoners’ rights contained in Division 4 of the Victorian Corrections Act 1986.'
This recommendation would have created a legally binding national standards framework ensuring minimum rights for people in custody — including access to health, legal representation, dignity, and community-equivalent conditions. However, it remains the only one of the 339 recommendations that was not endorsed by the Australian Senate, following a deliberate block from the Northern Territory government. This failure to legislate prisoner rights continues to undermine the potential for meaningful reform and fuels systemic inequality and harm.
Linking these failures, the pathway out of overcrowding is not more beds. WA already allocates over $800 million per year to adult and juvenile incarceration, and by 2023 had committed more than $300 million to new prison bed expansions — a strategy criticised by reform advocates like me as reinforcing cycles of imprisonment rather than addressing root causes. Per‑prisoner daily cost in WA exceeds $411, or roughly $150,000 annually per person.
In contrast, international models such as Norway, where more than 90% of children who offend once do not reoffend, demonstrate how community support, education, and rehabilitation can slash recidivism. In WA, by contrast, 90% of children who are arrested once go on to offend a second or third time — testimony to squandered opportunity and systemic neglect.
Despite decades passing since the Aboriginal deaths in custody royal commission, WA and national legislatures have not codified human rights‑based detention law: there is no national statutory framework mandating decent conditions, prohibiting inhuman or degrading treatment, or enforcing minimum standards for health, education, cultural support, or mental healthcare. The ACT has a model: its Human Rights Act 2004 applies to prison services in the Alexander Maconochie Centre, which is held to deliver services that are 'equal to those available in the community'.
Queensland’s Human Rights Act 2019 similarly guarantees rights such as humane treatment in detention, but does not live them 24/7. WA lacks all such statutory rights frameworks.
Key human rights obligations – aligned with Australia’s obligations under the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT) – include reducing reliance on imprisonment, shifting to rehabilitation, ensuring decent physical conditions, and preventive monitoring — none of which are institutionalised across WA’s prisons.
The psychological and physiological toll of overcrowding is multifaceted: disrupted sleep, reduced access to programs, increased self‑harm and violence, limited access to culturally appropriate support, and worsening mental illness. Suicides linked to unresolved infrastructural risks like ligature points illustrate the lethal consequences of constraints. Remand prisoners — who make up nearly half of all inmates — face limited access to even the so-called rehabilitation programs because of legal uncertainty and relative short stays.
From a human rights and public policy perspective, urgent legislative reform is essential: WA must adopt binding prisoner rights statutes that guarantee minimum conditions, health access, legal representation, independent complaint mechanisms and culturally responsive care. There must be statutory Custody Notification Service enforcement, protected avenues for reporting abuse, and oversight aligned with OPCAT monitoring — a Prisoners Notification Service (PCN). Prison policy should shift emphasis from incarceration to early intervention, poverty alleviation, diversion strategies, and community‑based alternatives that support at‑risk youth before entry to detention and similarly with adults — young and older. It is also ageism to argue that one is too old to change.
Without such reform, overcrowding will worsen. History shows that building more prisons just grows the population; better is closure. The Netherlands, having closed many prisons, exemplifies how rehabilitation‑centred systems reduce imprisonment without compromising community safety. Legislation that protects prisoner rights would create conditions for transformation, not punishment, enabling supports that reduce recidivism and open pathways to education, work, and cultural reconnection.
Western Australia urgently requires a human rights‑based prison overhaul: rights legislation, oversight, exit supports, investment in community alternatives, and alignment with international obligations. Without that, overcrowding, suicidality, systemic racism, and intergenerational harm will persist. Implementing robust prisoner rights laws is not just a moral imperative — it is essential public policy to break cycles of incarceration and rebuild lives.
Summary
- WA prison population rose 15% to 7,792 in June 2024.
- National adult prisons numbered 44,403; remand inmates now over 41%.
- Incarceration of First Peoples in WA and nationally continues at unprecedented rates. World’s highest incarceration rate.
- Overcrowding – four per cell, floor sleeping – correlates with acute mental ill-health crisis and self‑harm.
- Health care, legal access, and living standards remain well below community norms.
- WA lacks statutory prisoner rights legislation; recommended reforms remain stalled.
- Custody Notification Service still not legislated in WA.
- International models (Norway, ACT, Netherlands) show rights‑centred systems reduce recidivism.
- The solution lies not in more prisons, but in rights‑based law, early intervention, post-intervention. community programs, and independent oversight.
Gerry Georgatos is a suicide prevention and poverty researcher with an experiential focus on social justice.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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