WA prison overcrowding figures reveal up to four inmates crammed into one cell

Australia Broadcast Center

25-06-2025

Western Australia's jails are so overcrowded that as many as four prisoners have been left crammed into one cell hundreds of times in the past two months.
The scale of the problem has been laid bare in figures presented to parliament, which showed the state reached a record-high prison population in early June, with 8,545 people behind bars, easing only slightly in the weeks since.
The crisis has been brewing for months, with dozens of inmates forced to sleep on mattresses on the floor in conditions where three prisoners were crammed into cells in October last year.
Answers to questions from WA Greens leader Brad Pettitt in parliament last night showed the problem has only worsened since then.
Medium-security Acacia Prison had the highest number of prisoners who had been in cells with a total of four people in them, at 65 inmates between the start of the month and Monday.
But the problem appears worst in regional WA with Broome (59), Bunbury (43) and West Kimberley (41) prisons also reporting high numbers of inmates sleeping in cells with three others.
The state's two largest prisons had the highest number of inmates who had been in cells with three people sleeping in them — Hakea with 644 and Casuarina with 380 over the same period.
In February, the Inspector of Custodial Services described conditions in Hakea as "substandard and inhumane", in part because of overcrowding.
The Justice Department said it had implemented "a range of strategies" to address "short-term pressures caused by increased remand numbers".
"These arrangements are carefully managed in line with operational risk assessments and individual welfare considerations," a spokesperson said.
"The department continues to monitor population trends as part of its long-term custodial infrastructure plan."
The Justice Department told the ABC there had been 18 deaths in custody in the last year.
Dr Pettitt said the situation had reached crisis levels.
"The overcrowding in our prisons is jeopardising the safety of prison staff and prisoners, whilst undermining rehabilitation efforts and programs," he said.
"It should be a wake-up call and an opportunity for government to focus more strongly on preventative and rehabilitative programs, otherwise they will need to spend billions on more prisons."
Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics suggests pressures on WA's prisons are not a new phenomenon.
Those figures show WA's imprisonment rate, which was already the second highest in the country, increasing by 18 per cent between 2022 and earlier this year — more than three times the national average.
"One factor is an increase in the number of people charged with family and domestic violence offences," a Justice Department spokesperson said.
"This is a result of new FDV-related laws, a shift in community attitudes and increased confidence among victims to report offending."
Budget papers describe it as "unprecedented growth", with the department hoping to add more than 100 beds through "internal expansions of prisons".
"The government has also allocated $4.7 million towards custodial infrastructure planning for the delivery of a new long-term custodial infrastructure plan, and to commence planning to expand Acacia Prison and Casuarina Prison," it notes.
Hilde Tubex, director of criminology at the University of Western Australia's law school, said those high rates of imprisonment were a result of WA being "quite a punitive state".
But she warned building more and bigger prisons was not the solution.
"We believe that punishing people and putting people in prison, that that will make the society safer," she said.
"There's actually a lot of evidence to prove to us that that is not the case, that imprisonment is very expensive and that it's not very effective, as about 60 per cent of the people in prison have been in prison before.
"We know that if we leave people in the community and give them support and therapy to do something about their problems and just the basics like a job, a safe place to go to in the evening, that they do a lot better and that that's a lot cheaper."
For Professor Tubex, the fact a high proportion of the prison population is on remand — meaning they have not been sentenced — is a big concern.
"They don't have access to any programs at all, we just warehouse them for a time at a very high cost, and then we release them," she said.
Dr Pettitt said overcrowding and poor treatment of prisoners were choices of government.
"We could choose to do something different and actually do that justice reinvestment that actually gets in front, keeps people out of prison, invests in young people, invests in communities," he said.
"That actually can see that over the long term, our prison population decline.
"And unfortunately, we're not seeing that.
"We're instead just seeing this doubling down on harder policing and building more prisons, and that comes at a huge cost to the community, to the taxpayer, but ultimately to all of us — because we're not actually dealing with the fundamentals around stopping people committing crimes."