A State-by-State Look at Australia's Rising Prison Population

New prison data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) shows Australia's inmate population reached a high of 40,577 in the first quarter of 2017—the highest number on record. Worse, the number has climbed upward since, to 42,102 daily full-time prisoners.

"In the last five years […] the number of persons in custody has increased by 38 percent," according to the ABS report. That's 11,646 extra people locked up. Some states fared worse than others: New South Wales is host to the highest number of prisoners in Australia: 32 percent of the entire country's inmate population. Second-in-line is Queensland, with 21 percent of the national inmate population, and Victoria (17 percent).

Since last year, every state and territory has seen an increase in the prisoner numbers with the exception of Tasmania, where prisoners actually decreased by one percent (seven people). The Northern Territory saw the largest percentage increase of eight percent (132 people).

According to the report, "the average daily imprisonment rate for males was 408 persons per 100,000 adult male population, which was more than 11 times the rate for females (36 female persons per 100,000 adult female population).

"The Northern Territory continued to have the highest imprisonment rate of all states and territories with 958 persons per 100,000 adult population, followed by Western Australia with 342 persons per 100,000 adult population." The two major offence categories trending upwards in NSW, as reported in news.com.au, are sexual assault (up 7.2 percent) and indecent assault, act of indecency, and other sexual offences (up 6.3 percent).