If you look at the statistics, the number of prisoners in Australia has been going up since 2013. But the trend slowed last year. The Australian Bureau of Statistics Prisoners in Australia data of last year have been released. From June 30, 2018, to June 30, 2019, “the national imprisonment rate was 219 persons per 100,000 adult population, a decrease of 1 percent.”

At the same time, the number of female prison decreased 5% and Indigenous women behind bars decreased 11%. We were joined by Hilde Tubex, an associate professor at the Law School of the University of Western Australia who recently wrote an article, ‘Prisoner numbers in Australia have decreased, but we’re not really sure why yet’.