Australia’s two largest states show no signs of moving away from private prisons despite Queensland and Western Australia recently taking a number of facilities back into public hands.
By midway through next year, there won’t be any private prisons in Queensland, with only one left in Western Australia and South Australia and none in the Northern Territory or Tasmania.
But the New South Wales and Victorian state governments have continued to embrace the policy, handing lucrative and lengthy contracts to infamous private sector firms to operate prisons in the states, with no end in sight.
This is despite widespread concerns over a lack of transparency and accountability in private prisons, low staffing levels and issues around having private interests surrounding the detention and rehabilitation of marginalised members of society.
Independent reports into private prisons around the country have found higher rates of assaults on staff, concerns over a “marketised approach” to incarceration and a “bewildering” lack of clarity around basic operational matters in these facilities.
This emphasis on private prisons is also in contrast to even the USA, with incoming President Joe Biden pledging to end the federal government’s use of private prisons, and to make state and local prevention grants reliant on the elimination of private prisons.
The largest prison in Australia was recently opened in NSW, with the Clarence facility to be run by UK conglomerate Serco, which is also responsible for the country’s onshore detention facilities.
The contract was awarded by the current Liberal government, with no opposition from the Labor Party. NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge said there is little appetite in the state for a move away from private prisons.
“One of the real problems we have in New South Wales is that the so-called Opposition in the form of the Labor Party refuses to even discuss the issue, they continue to support the rolling out of private prisons,” Shoebridge said.
“They remain captured by a 1980s and 90s Thatcherite approach where there needs to be a competition between public and private sectors for the delivery of so-called prison services.”
The Greens are opposed to private prisons on “principle and practice”, Shoebridge said.
“We see them as a recipe for individual human rights abuses, by handing over the incarceration and care of some of the most vulnerable people in society to private corporations,” he said.
“It’s a systemic threat to politics, where large private corporations have the potential to receive substantive financial benefit from the state ramping up its prison population and taking a more aggressive approach to the incarceration of our citizens.”
The new private prison in NSW will eventually hold 1700 prisoners, making it the largest prison in Australia.
NSW Minister for Corrections Anthony Roberts has said contracting private companies to run these facilities “presents a level of competitive tension with the corrections system”, and that NSW and Victoria “certainly lead the way in ensuring that we have a very good balance between private and publicly-run prisons”.
The Labor government in Victoria also backs the use of private prisons, with US-based multinational GEO Group running the Fulham Correctional Centre and Ravenhall Correctional Centre, and British firm G4S running the Port Phillip Prison. These contracts run for decades and are worth billions of dollars.
Victoria’s prison population has skyrocketed in recent years to record numbers, due in part to a number of policy changes around bail and remand laws. While numbers dropped slightly this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the recent Victorian budget flagged that the state government expects the prison population to rise rapidly this financial year.
A spokesperson for the Victorian government has defended the decision to pursue public-private partnerships in running the state’s prisons.
“The corrections system in Victoria operates as one system and has a strong partnership with its private operators,” the spokesperson said. “Privately operated prisons are subject to a comprehensive performance management regime to ensure they deliver high quality correctional services.”
In 2018 the Victorian Auditor-General said there was not enough data available to decide whether private prisons are more cost-effective and safe than those run by the states, with “little data on whether Victoria’s prisons are safe, secure and meeting performance requirements publicly available”.
One of the few reports into the effectiveness of private prisons in Victoria found that the Ravenhall facility found “gaps and flaws” in the performance and evaluation framework applied to the GEO-run facility, and an ineffective recidivism program.
The Victorian Auditor-General found that Corrections Victoria does not have “any system wide evaluations” planned for the prison, and will be unable to determine whether it is better run as a private facility.
But the Andrews government has shown no sign of backing away from its privately-run prisons. The state government provided $1.8 billion for prisons and corrections in the 2019-20 budget, with a new facility at Lara and expansion programs in a number of others around the state.
The recent state budget included a further $100 million-plus for a new youth justice facility, while the infill expansion program continues at pace.
In contrast to this, the Queensland Labor government announced last year that it would be bringing its two private prisons back into public control by mid-2021 following a scathing report from the Crime and Corruption Commission’s Taskforce Flaxton.
This report identified high levels of assaults on staff in the private prisons, due to lower staffing numbers, along with significantly lower transparency compared to public prisons in the state.
“This marketised approach, where prisoners are operated by private, profit-driven organisations, disconnects the state from direct responsibilities for the delivery of privately-operated prisons,” the report found.
“This model creates challenges for the state in ensuring prisoners detained in privately-operated facilities are treated humanely and have appropriate access to programs and services.”
Both of these prisons will be operated by the state government by mid-next year.
After a report by the Western Australian Inspector of Custodial Services found a “bewildering” lack of clarity around basic operational matters at the privately-run Melaleuca Remand and Reintegration Facility, the state government moved to cut short the contract with Sodexo to run the prison. This process was finalised earlier this year, leaving just one privately run prison in Western Australia, the Serco-operated Acacia Prison.
While Serco’s contract is set to come to an end next year, the state government has confirmed that the prison will continue to be run privately.
Denham Sadler is a freelance journalist based in Melbourne. He covers politics and technology regularly for InnovationAus, and writes about other issues, including criminal justice, for publications including The Guardian and The Saturday Paper. He is also the senior editor of The Justice Map, a project to strengthen advocacy for criminal justice reform in Australia. You can follow him on Twitter.
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