The Northern Territory has long been notorious for having the highest incarceration rate in Australia and one of the highest rates in the developed world. In recent years, the NT prison population has soared, with reports of overcrowding and unsafe conditions abounding, and prisoners being housed in facilities not designed for long-term stays. This page deals with the worsening prison conditions in the NT, how the problem has arisen, and how the legal sector is responding.

Increasingly punitive criminal laws

The NT’s criminal laws have become significantly more punitive since the election of the Country Liberal party in 2024. 

Recent criminal law reforms have included:

  • tougher bail laws, including the requirement that the bail decision-maker has ‘a high degree of confidence’ that a person will not commit a serious offence or pose an unacceptable risk to the community if released on bail
  • changes to mandatory sentencing laws, including the introduction of a mandatory three-month prison term for certain assaults on frontline workers
  • the abolition of the principle that a young person should only be held in detention as a last resort
  • returning the age of criminal liability to 10, after it had been raised to 12 by the previous government

All of these reforms are believed to have contributed to the steadily increasing incarceration rate, which has long been the subject of widespread human rights concerns.

Surging prison population

The NT prison population has been steadily increasing for over a decade, with a sharp increase since 2021, and record-breaking prison populations since 2024.

As a result of a surging prison population, NT prisoners started to be housed for weeks or even months in police watch houses at the start of 2023. This controversial practice, where a person remains in custody in a watch house until there is room to transfer them to a correctional facility, is still continuing.

In January 2026, the ABC reported that Territory watch houses were also at capacity.

Ombudsman NT Watch House Investigation Report

In November 2025, the Ombudsman tabled the Watch House Investigation Report, detailing the experience of prisoners who were housed for long periods in watch houses designed for short-term stays. 

The report found that prisoners were held under extremely bad conditions including overcrowding, lack of time outside a cell, lack of access to fresh air, having to drink water from taps directly above the toilet, poor sleeping conditions, limited access to showers, limited access to family and other loved ones and stays lasting weeks or over a month.

The report was illustrated by photos showing overcrowded cells, including images of 17 prisoners sleeping in a single Palmerston watch house cell.

The report made 16 recommendations, most importantly that prisoners be removed from Territory watch houses as a matter of urgency.

Community responses 

The NT Anti-Discrimination Commissioner, Jeswyn Yogaratnam, expressed alarm at the conditions detailed in the Ombudsman NT Watch House Investigation Report, saying that the conditions fall far below domestic and international human rights standards. 

“Many people held in these conditions were on remand and had not been found guilty of any offence. The Government cannot trade away one group’s human dignity and right to presumed innocence under the guise of protecting others. Rights are not a zero-sum game,” Mr Yogaratnam said, calling on the government to act on all of the Ombudsman's recommendations immediately. 

Community legal organisations such as NAAJA have also rallied behind the Ombudsman's recommendations. NAAJA CEO Ben Grimes appealed to the Territory community to, ‘to look at the photos of the watch house conditions and ask yourself whether this is really who we want to be as a society.’

The NT government has accepted the Ombudsman’s principal recommendation in principle and committed to reducing reliance on watch houses as accommodation for prisoners. However, its response framed the issue as a temporary consequence of overcrowding in the prisons and focused on the gradual reduction of the use of watchhouses and improvement conditions, rather than an immediate cessation of the practice.

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