Abstract
It is just a decade since the first private prison opened in Australia, and now private prisons house approximately 3000 of Australia’s 20,000 prisoners. The Australian Institute of Criminology contributes to the debate generated by this phenomenon by providing factual data and adding value to those data. A number of deaths have raised the issue of whether private prisons are inherently more dangerous for inmates at risk. This paper examines numbers of deaths both in absolute terms and in terms of rates per 1000 prisoners per year.
It finds that:
- Public and private prisons have similar death rates for all causes of death and for suicide specifically.
- Death rates are higher in prisons that house remand and reception prisoners rather than long-term prisoners. Two large private prisons fall into this category.
- Examining deaths in the three largest remand and reception prisons (two private, one public) in their first 20 months of operation (the settling-in period) revealed that the death rate was about 3 times the national average for all prisons, while the suicide rate was about 4 times the national average.