Growing prison populations in Australia are costing $4.2bn a year despite falling crime rates, Labor says

‘The crime rate in Australia for most categories of crime has been falling since the mid-1980s,’ minister Andrew Leigh says. Photograph: Murray Mccloskey/AAP

Taxpayers are each forking out $140 more a year for prisons than would be needed if Australia maintained its 1985 rates of incarceration, according to Andrew Leigh.

The assistant treasury minister will reveal the cost of Australia’s rising incarceration rates in a speech to the Australian Institute of Criminology on Monday.