In recent months, we’ve seen prisons across Australia buckle under the weight of the very system they were built to uphold.

In New South Wales, 5000 officers walked off the job after a man imprisoned at Cessnock avoided further jail time for assaulting guards, triggering statewide lockdowns and leaving some prisons operating with only a handful of staff supervising hundreds of people. In Queensland, Townsville Men’s Correctional Centre went into lockdown after two officers were allegedly assaulted, with staffing shortages compounding the crisis.

And in South Australia, the violence keeps surfacing. At Adelaide Women’s Prison, a woman was brutally injured and an officer hospitalised, a moment immediately seized upon by the union to demand more money for prisons. Days later, reports emerged of another alleged attack at Yatala Labour Prison, where nine prisoners allegedly assaulted a single man until he lost consciousness, prompting a prolonged lockdown and further industrial demands.

Now, yet another alleged assault at Yatala has emerged: a 30-year-old man reportedly punched unconscious in a workshop lunchroom, blood pooling on the floor, ambulance called, guards again forcing a lockdown and union officials again insisting staffing and wages are to blame, not the inherently violent conditions that prisons cultivate.

These incidents are now being weaponised to justify harsher sentencing, tougher regimes and more punitive responses, as if brutality has ever delivered safety.

Correctional officers injured. Facilities locked down. Strikes. Panic headlines. Commentators calling for “real consequences” for people already living under total deprivation.

But let’s be honest. This is not a crisis of individual behaviour. This is the logical endpoint of a political project that has spent decades building cages instead of homes, courts instead of communities, police instead of support, punishment instead of possibility. A system that would rather remove children from their mothers, than resource families, police poverty instead of end it, and call that “public safety".

Across the country, governments have doubled down on punitive “law-and-order” rhetoric. Police powers have expanded. Bail laws have tightened. Remand populations are soaring. Record numbers are being held in prisons, packed two, three, sometimes four or more to a cell. “Bed expansions” are being sold as public safety while public housing dwindles. And with overcrowding has come rushed hiring drives: new and inexperienced staff recruited en masse through cash-bonus schemes, incentivised by sign-on payments rather than any notion of community care, trained to command, not care.

This is not a resourcing issue, it is the violence of prisons doing exactly what prisons do

Every time violence erupts inside a prison, the union’s response follows the same script: more funding, more staff, more power, more infrastructure. Every assault becomes a budget submission. Every crisis becomes an excuse to entrench the system further. But violence inside prisons is not a “resourcing failure". It is a design feature. It is a system built on coercion, deprivation and control. Prisons do not malfunction when violence occurs, they function according to the logic that created them.

And tellingly, the union’s fierce defence begins and ends with staff. When officers are harmed, we see industrial action, media blitzes, and threats to grind the court system to a halt. But when Aboriginal people die in custody, when women are denied healthcare and die in cells, when children in youth prisons self-injure at catastrophic rates, the silence is deafening. There are no walk-offs then. No urgent safety campaigns. No public fury.

The same organisations demanding more investment in prisons spend their legal budgets defending officers in coronial inquests, insulating the institution, justifying force and preparing the ground for the next “unavoidable tragedy".

This isn’t about safety. It has never been about safety. It is about power. It is about control. It is about maintaining the authority of a system that harms those it cages and those paid to guard them. It is a carceral logic that insists the only solution to its own violence is more of itself.

Prison violence is not a breakdown, it is the blueprint

Prisons are built on deprivation. They strip people of family, identity, autonomy, connection and dignity, then trap them in overcrowded, traumatic environments where fear, frustration and despair are constant companions. In those conditions, violence is not exceptional, it is inevitable. It is the architecture.

The people harmed in these incidents, whether staff or prisoners, deserved to be safe. But safety will never come from doubling the bars or sharpening the punishments. It will not come from panic sentencing or performative toughness. It will not come from inflamed rhetoric encouraging brutality as a form of “order".

Inside the culture: ‘Let us be thugs’

If you want to understand the culture we are dealing with, you don’t need a sociological treatise, just spend two minutes in the Facebook group _The Last Governor_, a page frequented by prison staff, and claimed to be, “A behind the scenes look at the NSW prison system through the eyes of a former governor”. Commenters there call openly for permission to “be thugs". They demand the right to “manhandle” prisoners: “The public have always thought of prison officers as thugs. So allow us be.” They fantasise about stripping people in custody of basic comforts: “Allow us to manhandle insubordination… take away their TV, aircon… turn it back to prisons not corrections,” and threatening magistrates with harm if they follow the law rather than punitive rage: “Sack the piss poor magistrate… pull all security from her court and see how safe she feels.”

This is not fringe sentiment. It is a worldview shaped by carceral thinking: officers are righteous, prisoners are disposable and violence is both grievance and solution. You cannot build pressure cookers and then be shocked when they explode.

If you want safety, you don’t build cages – you build futures

The violence inside prisons is not an argument for tougher measures. It is proof that punishment has failed. Real safety is created long before someone reaches a prison gate. It begins with housing people, not imprisoning them. With accessible and culturally appropriate healthcare, not criminalisation. With drug harm minimisation and support, not punishment. With community support, not police intervention. With Aboriginal self-determination, not state violence. With trauma-informed, healing justice, culturally grounded support, not surveillance.

Prisons promise safety and only deliver harm. They do not keep us safe; they warehouse pain and call it justice.

We can choose a different future

Everyone, inside and outside, deserves to live without fear of violence. Every worker deserves safety. Every prisoner deserves dignity and the chance to live differently than the conditions that shaped them. And we will never get there by tightening chains, hardening cells or throwing more money at cages.

We do not need more force. We need imagination. We need political courage. We need to think outside the cage and do the real work of building a society where punishment is no longer our first reflex or our final word.

Because when you build a nation around punishment, harm always finds a way out. And this country is overflowing with the proof.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.