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.
Including a death in custody at Acacia prison in WA, Victoria spending the most on youth detention, remand numbers skyrocketing in NSW and more.
In July 2025, four organisations came together to make sure the truth about prisons, policing and criminalisation in Australia was heard on the world stage.
In October last year, thousands of New South Wales prison officers also went on strike, plunging incarcerated people into abrupt and extended lockdowns.
Australia is in the midst of an epidemic of prison lockdowns. There is often little or no warning that these lockdowns are going to happen, leaving many people in virtual solitary confinement for hours or days.
The true cost of phone calls in prison has been revealed for the first time.
More than eight years since Ravenhall prison opened, recidivism rates at the prison are higher than those at public prisons.
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An Ombudsman investigation has found people in Canberra’s only prison paid nearly $125,000 to make phone calls across two years when this should have been free.
Should going to prison mean never being allowed to hug your partner or child? Is denying physical contact a just punishment, or does it harm families and human dignity? And what do human rights have to say about it?
While for the most part calls to mobiles are becoming cheaper, we clearly still have a long way to go.
Including seven children escaping youth detention in Tasmania, two men being charged over prison murder in Queensland, a coroner pushing for bans on spit hoods in prison in the Northern Territory and more.
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