The billion-dollar new prison Victoria doesn't need

Two new empty prisons in Victoria typify how the state government approaches criminal justice and incarceration as infrastructure and economic opportunities.

On the outskirts of Geelong, a “state of the art” prison spanning the length of five MCGs sits entirely empty. 

The Victorian government has pumped more than $1 billion into the construction of the Western Plains Correctional Centre, the state’s newest and largest maximum-security prison.

While construction on the prison is completed and it’s ready to be opened, the prison won’t be in use until at least 2024. Despite this, the state government is already hiring prison guards to man the facility, which will be used for training while it sits idle.

With a sharp drop in prison population since the onset of the Covid pandemic, Victoria’s existing prisons are far below capacity and the new facility is not needed, with more than 1000 spare beds in the state’s existing prison network.

The state’s $420 million new youth prison in Cherry Creek is also sitting empty after construction was completed in June last year.

The empty prisons now sit as testaments to the state government’s unwillingness to address the underlying issues and policies behind the previous skyrocketing of its prison population, and its approach to the issue as an economic and infrastructure opportunity.

Advocates and community groups also say that it signals the state government’s unwillingness to try to maintain the lower prison population rates and alter the policies that led to the explosion in incarceration over the last decade.

A billion-dollar prison

The new prison was announced in the 2018-19 budget, with $689.5 million provided to construct a 700-bed maximum security facility for men in the existing Lara prison precinct, which houses the existing Barwon prison and Marngoneet Correctional Centre.

At the time, there were about 7500 people incarcerated across Victoria, and this figure was steadily increasing. In deciding whether to address this significant issue and look to reduce incarceration rates or to use this as an infrastructure play and build new facilities on the assumption they’ll be filled, the Victorian government confidently picked the latter.

On the back of still increasing prison numbers, the state government nearly doubled the size of the still under construction prison in the 2019-20 budget, with the prison to now be able to house 1248 inmates.

In October 2019 the state government signed a contract worth $1.02 billion with John Holland for construction of the prison, running until late May this year.

A further $39.5 million was provided to the Western Plains prison project in the 2022-23 financial year by the Andrews government for “commissioning systems at the facility and maintaining the facility”.

In total, the new prison has cost $1.06 billion before it has even opened.

The huge spending on prisons should be redirected to preventive policies such as housing and mental health support, Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service CEO Nerita Waight says.

“It is unsustainable and it is draining money away from the things that actually make communities safer and stronger - like secure housing and community services,” Waight says.

“These prisons will continue to cost hundreds of millions of dollars every year they are operating. Long after the construction jobs have ended, these prisons will be stealing taxpayer money that should be spent on things like healthcare and education.

“Most Victorians want the government to invest in communities, not prisons, and that’s exactly what a good government would do.”

‘Training site’

Victoria’s prison population has significantly dropped since the beginning of the pandemic. As of the end of January, there were 6788 people in prison in the state, a near-10 percent drop from when the prison was announced.

Existing prisons in the state are only at 75 percent capacity, and there is no real need for the new facility now at all. According to recent government statistics, there were just under 8000 prison beds available as of early February. At the same time, there were 6,753 people in prisons across the state.

There is already significant capacity in the existing prison system, without the huge new facility.

This should be seen as an opportunity by the state government, which should look to make policy changes to keep the incarceration rate lower and reduce the economic costs of prisons like Western Plains, VACRO senior policy and advocacy advisor Abigail Lewis says.

“If the policy settings stay the same the prison population will skyrocket again, and Western Plains will be filled,” Lewis says. “What we need to focus on is the policies that we have in place that incarcerate people unnecessarily, like the punitive bail laws.”

“We believe and we always believe we should be investing in reducing the size of our prison system, not expanding it.”

Despite the drop in prison population, the state government is already embarking on a hiring spree to fill prison guard roles at the new prison. The job description for these roles state the facility won’t be taking any prisoners until at least the end of next year.

“Prisoner numbers are not expected to exceed the maximum-security capacity to existing prisons until at least late 2023 which will delay the need for additional maximum-security beds,” the job listing reads.

“As a staff member working from the initial stage of operations you will be a contributor to the foundations of this innovative new correctional facility.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice and Community Safety confirmed that construction on the prison was completed in November, and that a “small number” of staff have been recruited at the centre already.

“Analysis and planning regarding the best timing and model to bring the new Western Plains facility online is well underway,” the spokesperson said.

The facility will soon be used as a training site for prison guards, without any prisoners. This provides a “significant opportunity for training in a functional prison, without impacting operational prisons and prisoners”, the prison’s Community Advisory Group was told in May.

At this meeting in May, the group was told it would be meeting again in July, but no public minutes or summary has been posted for this meeting by the state government.

‘Quite enormous’

At a Public Accounts and Estimates Committee hearing in May last year, government representatives revealed that the state’s prison population is projected to reach 7650 by June 2023.

“We do not have a plan for prison numbers rising again, but we will be monitoring it closely, because we need to have a responsive system to ensure that we have that capacity in place should things change - should population grow, should things fluctuate,” they said.

“It is critical that we plan for the future and ensure that there is enough capacity in the system.”

At the hearing, they said the new prison is “quite enormous”.

The government’s public page on the new prison focuses nearly exclusively on the economic opportunities created by the new prison.

The site boasts of its construction creating 1200 jobs and investing $279 million in Greater Geelong.

Incarceration as infrastructure

This typifies how the state government approaches prisons and incarceration as infrastructure and economic opportunities. The rising prison population rates in recent decades were seen as an economic opportunity for the state, a way to launch huge infrastructure projects to be advertised as boons for local communities.

But the falling incarceration rates thanks to the pandemic have rendered the new facility entirely useless currently. There are concerns however that with such a facility there and vacant, the prison population will surge upwards again soon.

From the start of 2010 to the beginning of 2020, Victoria’s prison population skyrocketed by nearly 85 percent to 8160 people. But the Covid pandemic saw this figure drop significantly, due to extended lockdowns and efforts to keep people out of prison through diversion and other means.

In two years, the prison population dropped by nearly 20 percent to 6663 people. And across 2022 this number has stayed largely steady, despite most Covid restrictions having been lifted.

The Andrews government plunged $1.8 billion into a massive prison expansion program in 2018, as the state’s prison population was rapidly increasing.

Waight says this was a “political investment”, and has disproportionately impacted First Nations Victorians.

“It was about buying the votes of a very noisy, very small minority,” Waight says. “It was never about community safety or the economy.

“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people will bear the brunt of the government’s spending on prisons. Our people are the most over-incarcerated peoples in the world. Creating more prison capacity creates an incentive for the criminal legal system to continue to discriminate against our people by using us to fill these prisons.”