Australian authorities once embraced privately operated prisons. But some governments are taking back control

Inside the Borallon correctional centre, Australia’s first privately operated prison, in Queensland Photograph: Jono Searle/AAP

Tucked between a creek and a highway just outside Ipswich, in Queensland’s south-east, stands the first privately operated prison in Australia.

The Borallon correctional centre must have seemed futuristic for some inmates when it opened in 1990, given two of the state’s other prisons, in Brisbane and Townsville, were built more than a century earlier.