Plans to convert a Covid quarantine facility into a prison reflect a justice system responding to pressure with infrastructure instead of addressing the drivers of incarceration.

When quarantine camps become prisons, something has already gone wrong.

The Western Australian Government’s consideration of converting the Bullsbrook Covid quarantine facility into a prison reveals a justice system now operating beyond planning and into improvisation.

When governments begin repurposing unused pandemic infrastructure as prisons, it is no longer reforming. It is reacting.

The proposal comes in the context of custodial infrastructure under acute pressure. The state’s prison population has experienced rapid and “ unsustainable” growth over the past two years, ballooning by more than 1,000 prisoners in just two years. Facilities are overcrowded, people are sleeping on floors, staff are stretched. By the admission of those working within it, capacity is approaching its limits.

And so the response is to look for more beds.

But this is precisely the problem.

The logic is deceptively simple: more prisoners require more capacity. Yet this logic treats imprisonment as a fixed demand rather than a policy outcome. It assumes that rising prison numbers are inevitable, rather than produced; shaped by bail laws, policing practices, sentencing settings, and political choices.

The result is a reinforcing cycle: overcrowding drives emergency........

© Pearls and Irritations