News and Investigations

People in prison will be paid as little as $1 per hour to work on the state’s roads to free up maintenance crews to fix Victoria’s potholes under a plan the state government will take to the upcoming election.

There are many groups around the country that inspect prisons and provide feedback and recommendations to governments. These often involve visiting prisons and talking directly to people in custody.

This is what they’ve been up to in the last month.

Australia’s highest court will decide whether a woman in prison in Queensland should be allowed to freeze her eggs while she is incarcerated.

Including suppression orders being banned for some offenders in VIC, good character to be scrapped in sentencing in WA, major changes made to remand processes in NSW and more.

The prison environment does not lend itself to a good night’s sleep. There is now a wealth of research into the impact of poor sleep on our physical and mental health, and into sleep issues in prisons.

Two First Nations mothers have settled a case against NSW Police that alleged that hundreds of bail checks during the middle of the night on their teenage children amounted to trespass.

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After decades of campaigning, the state will scrap an offence punishable by up to a year in prison, shifting the response to poverty and homelessness away from policing.

Victoria Police now have the power to secretly access the financial records of anyone as part of investigations of all crimes under a last-minute amendment passed by Parliament quietly last week.

Including a man being unlawfully kept in prison for months after his release date in SA, the findings from the Capricornia Inspection in QLD, upcoming inspections in WA and more.

The NSW government has detailed a new statewide mental health emergency response model centred on paramedics responding to people who are in crisis in some cases, instead of police.