In early December, the NSW Inspector of Custodial Services tabled a report in state parliament that should have shocked the conscience of the nation, though, predictably, it didn’t.
The inspection of Sydney’s Long Bay Correctional Complex revealed vermin, mould, rusting beds, hanging points, inaccessible cells, broken showers, and facilities wholly unfit for people with disability, mental illness, age or frailty. Some wings were so neglected they had become home to stray cats, their fur and faeces embedded in spaces supposedly maintained for “short notice” reopening.
This is not an outlier. It is a snapshot of prison conditions across Australia: old, decaying, unsafe, and routinely justified as the inevitable consequence of punishment.
And every time a report like this emerges, the same tired debate follows: should we build new prisons?
But we reject the premise of that question entirely.
The answer to unsafe, degrading prison conditions is not to build more prisons or replace old cages with newer ones. That logic accepts incarceration as inevitable and permanent and merely debates the quality of the infrastructure that enforces it. We object to this framing because it diverts energy, resources, and political imagination away from what is urgently required: the active and immediate decarceration of people from prison.
Every new prison built locks in decades of imprisonment, expands the state’s capacity to cage, and guarantees that more people, disproportionately Aboriginal people, disabled people, people in poverty, and people on remand, will be funneled into confinement rather than supported in the community.
For that reason, we are calling for a moratorium on all new prison builds. This is not an argument for leaving people in unsafe or degrading conditions. It is a refusal to accept that the solution to state violence is a newer, cleaner version of the same harm. It means we are refusing the lie that the solution to state violence is a shinier version of the same violence.
We are not fighting for better cages. We are fighting for fewer people to be caged at all.
Across Australia, an extraordinary proportion of people in prison are there on remand, not convicted, not sentenced, not found guilty of any crime. They are legally innocent and entitled to the presumption of innocence, yet subjected to some of the harshest conditions in the system: indefinite detention, constant lockdowns, limited access to lawyers, limited access to programs, healthcare delays, and environments that actively exacerbate trauma, disability and mental distress.
This is not justice. It is administrative punishment masquerading as public safety.
Every person in prison, convicted or not, is having their human rights denied. The right to safety. The right to health. The right to dignity. These are not privileges to be earned by good behaviour; they are obligations the state owes to every person it cages.
Yet whenever new prisons or “modern wings” are built, incarcerated people are told they should be grateful.
Tabitha recalls being incarcerated in the then-new Ruby Unit at Adelaide Women’s Prison: “At morning muster, we were told again and again that it was a privilege to be caged in the new wing, that we should treat our imprisonment with gratitude. As if newer walls could convert state violence into a gift.”
But a cage is a cage is a cage. No amount of refurbishment changes that. You can polish a turd, but it’s still a turd. No matter how new that cage is, you still cannot visit family or cuddle up to loved ones when you want. You cannot walk down to the shops for a coffee when you want. You cannot go for a jog or bike ride along the local beach when you want. You have no liberty.
.
This attitude, that prisoners should be thankful for whatever conditions they’re given, surfaced again when news of Long Bay broke. On the “Last Governor” Facebook page, followed largely by current and former corrections officers and management, the comments were telling.
Some blamed prisoners outright: “Inmates themselves are responsible for some of the conditions they live in.” Others compared imprisonment to military hardship, dismissed suffering as deserved, or asked simply: “Who cares?”
And then there’s the familiar refrain: Why fix the cells when prisoners only wreck them anyway?
This question is illogical, inhumane environments heighten distress and increase the risk of harm to both prisoners and staff, but more importantly, it reveals far more about how society understands punishment than it does about incarcerated people.
Why do we expect people who are stripped of autonomy, surveilled constantly, denied privacy, subjected to strip searches, solitary confinement, physical and sexual violence, and bureaucratic cruelty, to treat their cages with reverence?
Why is gratitude demanded from people whose very existence has been reduced to containment?
The expectation that prisoners must demonstrate civility, respect, and care for the spaces of their confinement is not neutral. It is ideological. It demands obedience not just to the loss of liberty, but to the legitimacy of the system itself.
Resistance, anger, damage – these are not moral failings in the context of imprisonment. They are often the only remaining expressions of agency available to people who have had every other form of power stripped away.
When the state forces people into inhumane conditions with respect to where they sleep, when and what they eat, when they shower, when they speak, when they see their children, even how they use the toilet, what remains?
Sometimes, the only thing left is refusal.
The demand for politeness in the face of total and inhumane domination is a demand for submission. It is the same logic that asks oppressed people to protest “peacefully,” to suffer quietly, to be grateful for crumbs while the machinery of harm rolls on uninterrupted.
If society is uncomfortable with what resistance looks like inside prisons, it should be uncomfortable with prisons themselves.
Because the truth is this: new prisons do not fix old violence. They entrench it. They lock in decades more suffering, more deaths in custody, more families torn apart, more chronic mental health conditions, more public money funneled into punishment rather than housing, healthcare, income support, disability services, or community-led responses to harm.
Australian taxpayers spent around $6.8 billion on caging people in 2023-24, expanding prisons to hold an ever increasing number of prisoners. The punishment-by-imprisonment model entrenches harm rather than preventing it. It’s time to change the strategy.
Every dollar spent on a new prison is a decision not to decarcerate.
A moratorium on prison construction is not about neglect. It is about urgency. It is about redirecting political will away from concrete and razor wire and toward immediate decarceration; starting with people on remand, people with disability, people with chronic illness, Elders, and those imprisoned for poverty-related offences.
The conditions at Long Bay are indefensible. But the answer is not newer walls to hold the same injustices.
The answer is fewer cages. Full stop.
Until we confront that truth, we will keep repainting the bars and calling it reform, while demanding gratitude from the people trapped behind them.
I don’t think a new prison ‘locks in’ future imprisonment. If the exceedingly unlikely happened and the public and politiicians decided to empty prisons it could be done.
But the fact remains that prisons have existed from the start of this nation, indeed some time before that. That’s a pretty good hint that they have public support. While prison abolitionists have always existed they have never got within a bull’s roar of affecting their agenda because the policy would be as popular as legalizing child molesting.
Come to think of it closing prisons would amount to legalizing child molesting because practicing paedophiles would be at liberty in the community….assuming they are not lynched by people who would fear no sanctions because murder would unpunishable by prison too. Do the writers really want to live in that sort of society?
I suggest that objecting to new prisons being built is a waste of resouces for the writers. What they really need to do is to find some way of changing public opinion. A good place to begin would be to come up with a way of stopping crime that is more effective than incarceration- which at least works for the community for the period of time that it lasts. Very few murderes kill people in prison and I am certain that no child molester offends against children while locked up.
Thanks for engaging with our work.
This comment appears to rely on fear rather than evidence.
New prisons do lock in imprisonment, not because decarceration is impossible, but because once built they require staffing, budgets, and occupancy to justify their existence. Capacity creates pressure to fill beds. That’s how prison expansion works in practice.
Abolition does not mean “no accountability” or “legalising harm.” It means refusing to treat imprisonment as the default response to every form of harm, particularly when evidence shows prisons do not prevent violence or address its causes. Prisons intervene after harm has occurred; they do not stop it happening in the first place.
Invoking child sexual abuse to shut down debate is a familiar tactic, but it ignores reality. Most abuse occurs in homes and institutions, often without prior convictions. Incarceration has not prevented that.
Public opinion is not fixed. It is shaped by political choices, media narratives, and decades of fear-based rhetoric. Arguing that something should not be challenged because it is currently unpopular is an irrational position – a rhetorical ploy known as ‘appeal to popularity’. It is an argument against many social changes that have occurred.
Objecting to new prisons is not a waste of time. It is a refusal to continue investing billions of dollars in an approach that expands harm while crowding out alternatives: housing, healthcare, disability support, income security, community-based responses to violence and other abuse – all things that actually reduce the conditions in which harm occurs.
The real question is not whether prisons can theoretically be emptied. It is whether we are willing to stop building more of them and start investing in ways of keeping people safe without relying on cages.