These are places where COVID-19 might run amok.

Many don't care. Do the crime, do the time, they say.

But perhaps we should be a little more curious who these men are, and why they are living right in the middle of us.

The Hunter has four prisons. One, the St Heliers Correctional Centre, is a minimum security prison farm halfway between Muswellbrook and Aberdeen. A Corrective Services NSW spokesperson advises it holds 270 inmates.

The other three prisons are clustered on the northern edge of Cessnock. A look at historical photos, say from Google Earth, shows the incredible growth of the Cessnock complex. From a 2004 image you see a single Cessnock jail perched on the hill surrounded by fields of demountable classrooms under construction, back then the jail's signature work pursuit.

An image from the end of 2019 shows a dramatically different landscape. The demountables are gone. The open fields are built out. Two jails have been added. The original Cessnock jail now holds 520 minimum security prisoners. The new jails, called Shortland and Hunter, both maximum security, hold 610 and 400 inmates respectively.

Unfortunately, NSW authorities tell us little about the inmates in the Hunter's prisons. Detail in statistical reports is minimal. I was lucky to have my special request for data for this column responded to. But information about prison life, daily routines, work and training opportunities and so on are not available. Which should be of concern to all but the lock 'em up, throw away the key brigade.

How often should we need to re-learn that evil deeds are more likely when the doors of an establishment are bolted? Royal commission after royal commission - into Aboriginal missions, boarding schools, nursing homes, facilities for the disabled, children's detention centres - reveal that good never comes from closing our institutions to public scrutiny.

From what we are permitted to know, then, two prison trends in the Hunter stand out. The first is that around 29.4 per cent of the Hunter's prison population, or 529 of all our inmates, are Aboriginal men. This is alarming given only 2.9 per cent of the NSW population are Aboriginal or Torres St Islander. If the rate of imprisonment for Aboriginal men was the same as non-Aboriginal men, the number of Aboriginal men in Hunter prisons would be only 52.

A recent paper by Labor MP Andrew Leigh reveals that the incarceration rate for Aboriginal people in Australia now exceeds the rate for African-Americans in the US, a group long seen as suffering deep-rooted discrimination by police and the courts. It seems that Australian Aboriginal people are the new world-wide benchmark for imprisonment on the basis of race.

The second is that the number of prisoners in NSW is rising dramatically, with the Hunter hosting a lot of the increase. But what is behind this growth? Andrew Leigh's paper provides perplexing detail. Crime rates in Australia have fallen significantly over the last three decades especially for crimes involving robbery, physical assault, motor vehicle theft and break-ins.

Yet imprisonment levels in NSW over this three-decade period have risen by 119 per cent, says Leigh. He speculates on the reasons.

One is that police have been more successful in catching those responsible for homicides, assaults, sexual assaults and robberies, a good outcome. But the growth in prisoners, says Leigh, has also come from increases in the length of sentences actually served.

In addition, tougher bail conditions mean more unconvicted inmates waiting trial, while under-resourced court systems mean a longer list of inmates waiting for sentencing.

A combination of these pressures, especially involving the growth of unsentenced inmates, has meant dramatic growth in the number of men locked away on the hill at the back of Cessnock.

Last week the NSW parliament passed laws to allow some of these men to be given custody arrangements outside of prison as a response to a rising risk of infection by COVID-19. It's the humane thing to do, surely.

And there may well be other humane things that need doing for these 1800 men. Like it or not, our region is their daily abode.