Each edition contains news articles and investigative pieces. These are topical stories that are usually about prisons and criminal justice.
We also summarise the latest criminal justice news around the country.
In nearly every Australian state and territory, there are thousands of people facing prison time due to unpaid fines.
Including a Corrections Minister stepping down in WA, inmates helping raise orphaned lambs in NSW, mandatory sentencing for gun theft in TAS and more.
Welcome to Coronial Corner, where we chat the coroners’ courts and what they say about preventable deaths in custody and the broader system.
In prison, time is both punishment and currency. It is counted in courtrooms, crossed off calendars and measured against the possibility of release.
On an average night, there are about 900 children in youth detention around the country.
Long wait times to access rehabilitation and wellness programs and a lack of even basic pre-release support is contributing to high recidivism rates in Queensland, the state’s Auditor-General has found.
A successful Australia-first drug and alcohol rehabilitation program in a WA prison will soon shut down due to overcrowding.
The state government introduced legislation to Parliament last week that allows for people in prison’s legal right of one hour in the open air every day to be limited due to a range of reasons.
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A man was unlawfully kept in a South Australian prison for months after his release date due to a “systems error”, and was not told about this for five years, an Ombudsman investigation has found.
South Australia is the only state or territory in Australia that does not provide 24/7 medical staff on site at its women’s prison.
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A program helping First Nations children being held in police watch houses in Queensland will stop operating after losing its state government funding.
The Victorian government in late February announced plans to remove the use of ‘good character’ references at sentencing.
Including a smoking ban no longer going ahead in WA, changes to the Home Detention Scheme in SA, a hiring spree at Lockyer Prison and more.
In my speech, I emphasised that strip searching is sexual assault disguised as prison safety. Strip searching is not about safety – and the data proves it.
There are more than 4000 places in Australia where people can access free clean needles and syringes. But there are none in any prison.
There have been 29 deaths in custody in the first three months of this year.
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The family of proud Noongar man Jeffrey Winmar have travelled to Victoria to push for answers and justice at a coronial inquest into his death in police custody in late 2023.
Cells at the courts are so full that people can’t be taken there from prison to attend their hearings.
Project: herself is an organisation I set up to advocate and support women to have self-determined lives. We do that through a couple of things – including storytelling advocacy and frontline service delivery.
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