Canberra: Australia’s jail population has hit a record high of more than 41,200 prisoners, as a 20-year surge in incarceration rates shows no sign of waning.

The daily average of full-time prisoners in custody rose 7 per cent to 41,204 over the year to the June quarter, according to figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Monday.

That represented a 133 per cent leap in prisoner numbers since the June quarter of 1997, meaning the national jail population grew at more than four times the rate of the overall population over the last two decades.

The cost of running prisons in Australia is likely to have hit around $3 billion (Dh11 billion) a year, based on Productivity Commission figures.

Inmates on remand awaiting court sentences (11 per cent) and women (10 per cent) were the fastest-growing groups of prisoners over the last year.

Indigenous prisoner numbers rose 7 per cent in line with the overall increase but they remain grossly over-represented in jail, making up 2 per cent of the general population but 28 per cent of the prison population.

Keith Hamburger, who formerly ran Queensland’s jail system as the state’s first director general of corrective services, said prisons “basically around the country at the moment are overcrowded”.

But “just building more prison cells and stuffing people into them is not the answer”.

Most in jail were on short sentences and with a lack of treatment programmes to help stop reoffending. The system cried out for “a different approach from our policymakers”, Hamburger said.

“We need high-security prisons for dangerous long-term offenders,” he said. “But we are building far too many prison cells for people who churn through, spend weeks or a few months on remand, a few months in jail, then go out again.”

Surging prison numbers were one result of populist “tough on crime” lawmaking by state governments including mandatory sentencing and tougher hurdles for bail, Hamburger said.

Many people, especially women, were stuck in jail because they could not access safe accommodation or drug treatment programmes they needed for otherwise willing magistrates to grant bail, Hamburger said.

“Now, if we had bail hostels with substance abuse programmes attached to them, we could take a lot of people out of remand prisons around Australia tomorrow,” Hamburger said.

“We’re just going about this the wrong way because it’s ridiculous when somebody gets a bail order, particularly for women offenders, and they’ve got a substance abuse problem and inappropriate or unsafe accommodation, and we slot them into jail instead of looking for a more cost-effective option.

“If [the] government put a bit of effort into that in terms of times and resources, that’d be far more cost-effective than jail.”

Hamburger said the indigenous imprisonment rate was “shocking and in terms of trying to do something, I reckon that’s low-hanging fruit”.

He is a proponent of indigenous enterprises being given a bigger role in running “a lot of these hostels and healing and rehabilitation facilities” to cut imprisonment rates.

One of the few signs of any fall in jail statistics was the indigenous imprisonment rate in the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, which both fell by 4 per cent in the last year, according to the ABS.

Hamburger said the rise in overall prison numbers demanded “meaningful” action on two main fronts: rehabilitating offenders and getting them back to a “law-abiding lifestyle” in their community, and “dealing with the drivers of social and economic dislocation that a lot of communities are experiencing”.

“Most [offenders] come from difficult socioeconomic backgrounds, have had problematic education experiences and many come from abusive and neglectful families,” Hamburger said. “Than we put them in prisons, which are basically [overcrowded] around the country.

“There’s a lack of treatment programmes and the great majority of sentences are relatively short sentences.

“So just building more prison cells and stuffing people into them is not the answer.”