In 2010, Cessnock's single jail had 430 inmates. Today, three jails are crammed onto that single site. They house 1465 inmates. In the upper Hunter, St Heliers prison near Muswellbrook has 245 inmates, bringing the Hunter total to 1710 prisoners. On its own, the Cessnock complex contains more prisoners than famous NSW lock-ups like Long Bay, Parklea, Junee, Bathurst or Goulburn. Cessnock has become number one.

Former head of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) Don Weatherburn explains Australia's falling crime rate in his book The Vanishing Criminal.

But what about the rising imprisonment rate? Obligingly, Dr Weatherburn directs me to an article he wrote last year for the ANZ Journal of Criminology for an explanation. There, Dr Weatherburn downplays the significance of stricter bail laws and tougher sentencing as the causes of rising imprisonment rates. Other factors are more important, he says.

One is longer periods spent in custody by those eventually acquitted by the courts. The average remand period for this group was 156 days in 2013 but an extraordinary 379 days in 2019. This problem, says Dr Weatherburn, is caused by congestion in the courts. Keeping untried, eventually innocent, people under lock and key for such periods is not acceptable, is it?

Another factor leading to rising numbers of prisoners, says Dr Weatherburn, is new police practices. Weatherburn points to a suite of practices introduced in NSW in 2000 called the STMP or 'suspect target management plan'. The STMP involves targeting people more likely to be active crime perpetrators, and crimes where prison sentences are probable. STMP-style policing, therefore, ensures a greater proportion of crime perpetrators appear before the courts, more are convicted and more proceed to jail, even while crime rates are falling.

Such outcomes, no doubt, are popular. But there are outcomes which are worrying. One component of STMP-style policing, says Weatherburn, involves aggressive surveillance of early-release schemes where breaches of parole conditions lead readily to a 'do not pass go' return to the slammer. It's an easy way of getting favourable arrest numbers and eye-catching graphs for the NSW police force's annual reports. Read them online and you'll see what I mean.

Another outcome of serious concern is the rising presence of Indigenous people in the criminal justice system and as inmates of our prisons. A corrective services spokesperson tells me that 25.5 per cent of the Hunter's prisoners are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people, which equates to 436 inmates.

If the Indigenous imprisonment rate matched the presence of Indigenous people in the general population there would only be 50 Indigenous people in Hunter jails. Something is seriously wrong here.

The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody delivered its final report 30 years ago next month. One of its major findings was that a disproportionate number of Indigenous people were dying in jail because a disproportionately larger number of Indigenous people were being sent to jail.

It's a simple, stark fact.

Yet, a BOCSAR report written by Dr Weatherburn in 2017 shows the Indigenous imprisonment rate in Australia actually rose by 63 per cent between 1993 and 2016. How can public policy fail so miserably?

Last year we watched protests across the US following the death in Minneapolis of the African-American man, George Floyd, while in custody of a police officer. Subsequently, Black Lives Matter rallies across the US protested policing practices unfair to African-Americans and an incarceration rate over five times the rate for white Americans.

Yet, to our shame, Australia's Indigenous people suffer higher imprisonment rates than do African-Americans.

Three decades on from a Royal Commission, prisons have become a major issue for our region. Cessnock's pop-up jails are an experiment in handling the state's rising number of prisoners. They are also places where Australia's Indigenous people are incarcerated at a rate now worse than anywhere on the planet.

We may not have created the problem. But we have no choice than to be part of the solution.

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