In 2024, the number of men in Australian prisons was 40.97 thousand. Significantly fewer women are incarcerated in Australian prisons and while the number of men has increased more steeply from 2015, the number of imprisoned women has remained low in comparison.

In 2022, around 5,515 people were imprisoned for illicit drug offences in Australia. In the previous year, around 6,325 people were imprisoned for the same crime.

In 2022, illicit drug offenders represented 13.6 percent the prison population in Australia. Between 2010 and 2022, the proportion of drug offenders in Australian prisons peaked at 15.8 percent in 2015.

Correctional and detention service providers strive to uphold a safe, secure and humane correctional system, integrating rehabilitation, education and public safety elements. The industry comprises operators and managers of prisons, community correctional facilities, adult offender programs, onshore immigration detention centres, juvenile detention facilities and other related services. Australia’s prison population has fallen in recent years because more people are either being granted bail or sentenced to community correction orders, resulting in lower levels of government funding for the Correctional and Detention Services industry. The use of immigration detention centres has declined considerably because of falling illegal immigration and rises in the prevalence of bridging visas, and as these detention centres are increasingly considered inhumane. Industrywide revenue is anticipated to have declined at an annualised 1.6% over the past five years and is expected to total $9.4 billion in 2024-25, when it’ll dip by an estimated 2.5%. Most prisoners and industry facilities are located in New South Wales, while the Northern Territory has the highest number of prisoners compared to its population due to its high levels of social disadvantage. The industry’s main revenue source is government funding, with most correctional and detention facilities operated by the government. Private-sector companies operate a small number of facilities, although this number is declining as state governments take back control amid performance issues. Profit margins have shrunk as the government reclaims ownership of prisons since state-operated prisons aren’t designed to make a profit. Over the next five years, crime levels are projected to rise as economic activity recovers and Australia’s population increases. A greater prison population and increased focus on inmate welfare will ensure that government funding for correctional and detention facilities remains high. Industry revenue is forecast to climb at an annualised 0.8% through 2029-30 to total $9.8 billion.

The ALIA Minimum Standard Guidelines for Library Services to Prisoners in 2015 states that everybody has the right to read, learn and access information, including prisoners. Prison libraries and librarians are essential to achieving this. Information professionals are ideally placed to advocate for this and to endeavour to close the information divide for an increasingly disadvantaged section of our community. In addition, to the information divide, prisoners are also becoming victims of the digital divide, with the use of the internet being banned for all prisoners in Australia and access to computers restricted to educational use only.The prison population consists of a disproportionately high number of people with low literacy, indigenous Australians, people who have been abused as children and those suffering from mental illness. Studies have shown that crime and substance abuse is higher in those with low literacy and that recidivism (returning to prison) is reduced by educating prisoners.

This dataset lists inmates incarcerated at Cockatoo Island prison in Sydney (Australia) between 1847-1869. It offers insights into how the colonial criminal justice system operated after New South Wales’ transition from a penal colony to a ‘free’ colony when transportation ceased in 1840. It is a useful tool for genealogists tracing the lives of their criminal ancestors and for historians of crime and punishment researching nineteenth-century Australia. The dataset includes prisoners' names and aliases, their ship of arrival, place of origin, details of their colonial conviction(s) (trial place, court, offence, sentence), date(s) admitted to Cockatoo Island, and when and how they were discharged from Cockatoo Island. In some cases, it also includes prisoners' place of origin, occupation, biometric information (height, eye/hair colour, complexion, scars, tattoos), 'condition upon arrival' (convict or free), and (for convicts) details of their original conviction in Britain or Ireland. As a UNESCO World Heritage 'Convict Site' Cockatoo Island is best known as a site of secondary punishment for recidivist convicts, especially those transferred from Norfolk Island. This dataset demonstrates the diversity of the prison population: including nominally free convicts (ticket-of-leave holders), migrants from Britain, China and other Australian colonies drawn in by the gold rush, exiles from Port Phillip, Aboriginal Australians convicted during frontier warfare, colonial-born white Australians (including bushrangers), and black, Indian and American sailors visiting Sydney. Significant attention has been paid to the more than 160,000 British and Irish convicts who were transported Australia as colonists between 1787 and 1868. Much less has been said about those punished within the criminal justice system that arose in the wake of New South Wales' transition from 'penal' to 'free' colony (Finnane, 1997: x-xi). Cockatoo Island prison opened in 1839, a year before convict transportation to New South Wales ceased, and was intended to punish the most recidivist and violent of the transported convicts. This archetype has prevailed in historical discourses, and they have been described as 'criminal lunatics... [and] criminals incapable of reform' (Parker, 1977: 61); 'the most desperate and abandoned characters' (O'Carrigan, 1994: 64); and people of 'doubtful character' (NSW Government Architect's Office, 2009: 29). Yet, this was far from the truth. My analysis of 1666 prisoners arriving between 1839-52 show they were overwhelming non-violent offenders, tried for minor property crimes at lower courts. They were also far more diverse population than commonly recognised, including Indigenous Australian, Chinese and black convicts alongside majority British and Irish men (Harman, 2012). This project will make publicly available extremely detailed records relating to Cockatoo Island's prisoners to show people firsthand exactly who made up the inmate population. The digital version of the original registers will include information on convicts' criminal record, but also their job, whether they were married or had children, and even what they looked like. It will also be a name-searchable database so family historians can search for their ancestors, who may have been incarcerated on the island. As it stands, they will be able find information online about ancestors who were transported as long as they remained in the 'convict system', but they may seem to disappear as soon as they are awarded their ticket-of-leave and become 'free'. However, many former convicts, and free immigrants, to New South Wales were convicted locally, and these records can give us information about their lives within the colony. The type of data included in these registers will also allow researchers to investigate questions including: (1) were convicts more likely to offend again than free immigrants? (2) Were the children of convicts more likely to offend than others? (3) Did the influx of mostly Chinese migrants during the gold rush actually lead to a crime-wave, as reported in the press? (4) Were laws introduced between 1830 and 1853, actually effective at prosecuting bushrangers (highwaymen)? (5) Was the criminal-judicial system in Australia more rehabilitative, despite developing out of a harsher convict transportation system? Alongside the dataset, the website will include 'life-biographies' of individual convicts to show you how this dataset can be used to piece together a life-story. It also to warns against understanding a real-life person only through the records of their conviction. There many of fascinating stories to tell, including those 'John Perry' ('Black Perry') the prizewinning boxer; the love story of the 'Two Fredericks'; and Tan, the Chinese gold-digger who resisted his incarceration. In addition, there will be teaching resources for secondary school children and undergraduate university students who want to engage directly with historical materials, without having to leave their classroom. Overall, this website invites anyone with an interest in the history of crime and punishment, and any visitors to the UNESCO world heritage site 'Cockatoo Island', to try searching for a name in the database or read about a featured convict's life story. It asks them, though, to think about how and why these people's lives intersected with the state, leading to their incarceration, and how history has erased much of their lives outside of it. Data collection involved photographing a Cockatoo Island’s surviving prison registers and returns kept at the State Archives of New South Wales (call numbers: 4/4540, 4/6501, 4/6509, 6571, 4/6572, 4/6573, 4/6574, 4/6575, X819). In these volumes, clerks had listed details of incoming prisoners on the dates they arrived between April 1847 and October 1869. This prison register for the period 1839-46 (call number: 2/8285) had not survived to a good enough quality for accurate transcription and was excluded from data collection. I photographed and then transcribed these records in full into a tabular form, with minor standardisation of abbreviations and irregular spellings. Where multiple records existed for one person I combined information from two separate archival records into one line of the dataset. Where I could not verify that two people with the same name were the same person, I listed them as separate entries. Barring errors in entry at the time of record creation, the studied population represents the entire population of prisoners incarcerated at Cockatoo Island between April 1847 and October 1869 when the prison closed.

In 2021, around 664 people were imprisoned for fraud, deception, and related offences in Australia. In the previous year, around 767 people were imprisoned for the same crime.

In 2024 a total of 27 indigenous Australians died in custody in Australia. The peak number of aboriginal deaths in custody was in 2022, with 32 indigenous people having died while being in custody. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are still disproportionately represented in the justice system and have poorer health outcomes than their non-Indigenous counterparts. This disparity has been recognized by contemporary Australian governments, with numerous initiatives and reports being commissioned to tackle these issues. However, to this day, there remains a large gap in equality experienced by Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Aboriginal incarceration rates The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody report, which was published in 1991, was commissioned by the Australian Government to study the underlying issues leading to deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in custody. The report referred to the disproportionately high incarceration rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australian prisons and highlighted underlying social issues as well as gaps in health, life expectancy and education outcomes for Indigenous people. Despite the recommendations of the report, the rates of Aboriginal people in custody have since continued to increase and more than 547 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have died in custody since 1991. Closing the Gap In an effort to close the gap in disadvantage for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the federal, state and territory Governments made a commitment to work together around the Closing the Gap Framework in 2008. The goal of the framework was to improve key outcomes early childhood, schooling, health, economic participation, healthy homes, safe communities, and governance and leadership. Of the seven targets listed in the framework only the early childhood education enrollment and year 12 attainment targets were considered to be on track.

This statistic displays the proportion percentage of people imprisoned for homicide in Australia from 2010 to 2018. In 2018, approximately 7.4 percent of all people imprisoned in Australia was due to homicide.

In 2024 a total of ** non-indigenous Australians died in custody in Australia. The death peak was in 2020, when ** people died while in custody.

In 2024, Australia recorded the highest number of deaths in custody for people in the age group of ** or over. Over ** people were registered to have died while being in custody in this age group.

In 2024, there were approximately 28.29 thousand non-indigenous prisoners and around 15.87 thousand Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners incarcerated across Australia. The number of people imprisoned in Australia has risen considerably in 2017, and dropped slightly in the years after.

In 2022, the share of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia's prison system was 31.8 percent. In the Northern Territory, Indigenous people made up 87 percent of the prisoner population that year.

Between 2012 and 2022, the share of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia's prison system trended upwards, increasing from 27.2 percent in 2012 to 31.8 percent in 2022. Indigenous Australians are starkly overrepresented in the criminal justice system.

In 2024, ** people were being recorded who were sentenced to imprisonment and died in custody. In the same year, around ** people who not sentenced to being imprisoned also died while being in custody.

In 2024, around four people died during the pursuit in a motor vehicle in Australia. Other attempts of detainment resulted in the death of ** people in the same year.

In 2022, approximately 2,329 per 100,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were imprisoned, compared to approximately 201 per 100,000 non-Indigenous people in Australia. Contrastingly, at the 2021 Census in Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people made up just 3.2 percent of the nation's population, demonstrating the stark overrepresentation of First Nations people in Australia's prison system.

In 2024, around 3,763 number of people were imprisoned for unlawful entry with intent in Australia. In the previous year, the figure stood around 3,594 number of people.

In 2024, around 632 number of people were imprisoned for property damage or environmental pollution in Australia. In the previous year, around 562 number of people were imprisoned for the same reason.

In 2024, around 12,315 people were imprisoned for assault or acts intended to cause injury in Australia. The figure has stayed above the 9,000 mark since 2017.