A leading criminologist has warned chronic overcrowding and lack of separation between prisoners at Canberra's jail could threaten inmate safety, while urging the government to consider separate facilities for unsentenced and female detainees.
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Prisoner numbers at the Alexander Maconochie Centre reflected a nationwide trend and jumped 4 per cent in the year to June, the latest quarterly prison data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed.
The number of inmates in the ACT rose from 338 in March to 355 in June. That figure had climbed from 340 prisoners in June last year.
Prisoner numbers have hovered around 373 in recent weeks, putting pressure on the territory's main jail and the temporary 30-bed Symonston overflow facility, which has also reached capacity.
In coming days, about 30 detainees will move into a new special care unit for inmates who need help for drug addiction or behavioural problems. It was designed to ease some of the accommodation pressures.
The 30-bed unit was the first stage of a $54 million expansion project that will boost accommodation at the jail by 110 beds with additional surge capacity. The overall expansion will boost the jail's capacity to 512.
Corrections Minister Shane Rattenbury said the new facility would provide some short-term relief from the jail's "intense accommodation pressures" until the neighbouring 56-cell block significantly eased demand on the existing facilities mid-next year.
ACT criminologist David Biles said crowded cell blocks and few options to split troublesome prisoners meant tensions could simmer, and boosting segregation options would be vital in the expansion.
"There are just so many different types of people within the AMC. The senior staff are concerned about safety, they would hate for detainees to be bashed or even killed.
"The ACT's a fairly small community and a lot of offenders know one another and a lot of difficult circumstances arise when grievances outside of jail echo or become known inside jail."
Dr Biles was also critical of the centre's high number of unsentenced prisoners, with unsentenced prisoners accounting for 122 of the jail's 340 full-time detainees at the end of June.
"There is a rule in human rights law that unconvicted people, remandees, must be kept separate from sentenced prisoners and they're not, they're intermingled right through.
"I'm hoping that once the fifth ACT Supreme Court judge is brought in, that will ease some pressure on remandees who have been in jail for say three months or more because they'll want to move them through."
Dr Biles urged the government to consider a separate remand centre for unsentenced detainees and another facility for the ACT's small number of full-time female prisoners.
Opposition corrections spokesman Andrew Wall said the new buildings would provide the ACT's jail system with "a small amount of breathing room" once they were completed.
But he doubted they would offer a long-term solution and urged the government to develop a master plan that would look at addressing future demand.
"I think unless there's a significant turnaround in the prison population, this will not be the last time the prison is expanded unless the government has a magic bullet to stop a growing offending rate and a growing incarceration rate."
The average number of detainees at the AMC had risen from 275 in 2012, to 294 in 2013, and to 336 last year.
The ABS data, published on Thursday, showed the ACT's imprisonment rate of 117 inmates per 100,000 adults dropped from 113 prisoners a year ago and remained the lowest in the country.
The number of prisoners surged 6 per cent to reach 34,034 full-time inmates nationwide in the June quarter.
