◆ Content note
This piece describes conditions of detention affecting adults and children, including conditions involving exposed toilets, menstruation, and self-harm. Some readers may find the descriptions distressing. Crisis support: 13YARN (13 92 76).
A police watchhouse is, in law and in architecture, a short-term facility. It exists so that a person who has been arrested can be held safely for the hours — not days — it takes to either charge them and move them on, or release them. The cells are designed for that period. There is no natural light. The lights do not turn off. Showers, exercise, visitors, education, medical care, legal privacy: all of these are things a prison is supposed to provide. A watchhouse is not.
In the Northern Territory, this architectural and legal distinction has been allowed to collapse.
The most authoritative account we now have of what that collapse has looked like is the Acting Ombudsman's own-motion investigation into the conditions for Territory prisoners in NT Police watch houses, tabled in Parliament in late November 2025 as Tabled Paper 573.[1] Across 79 pages, it documents what happened inside three watchhouses — Palmerston, Alice Springs and Katherine — during the four months from 1 November 2024 to 28 February 2025, a period the Acting Ombudsman describes as acute.
The investigation was limited in scope. It did not examine children in youth detention, and it did not examine every watchhouse. It examined what happened to adults who had been sentenced or refused bail, and who should have been in a correctional centre, but who were held instead — for weeks at a time, in some cases for over fifty days — in cells that were designed to hold people for a couple of days.[1]
What the Ombudsman found
The investigation was led and signed by Bronwyn Haack, Acting Ombudsman of the Northern Territory. It drew on 31 complaints received by the Ombudsman's office between November 2024 and March 2025, on repeated site visits by Ombudsman's officers, and on two rounds of written notices to the Department of Corrections and the Northern Territory Police Force.[1]
The top-level finding is unambiguous. The Acting Ombudsman concluded that the conditions in which Territory prisoners were being held were, in the language of the Ombudsman Act 2009, "unreasonable and oppressive".[1] She made 16 recommendations. The first — that the Northern Territory Government remove Territory prisoners from watchhouse facilities "as a matter of urgency" — was accepted, in principle, by both Corrections and NT Police.[1]
What that language describes, in practical terms:
◆ What the Ombudsman's investigation documented
Severe crowding. At the Palmerston watchhouse, 17 people in cells assessed at a maximum of 17. Floor space per prisoner routinely below two square metres, including the space taken up by mattresses and toilets — well under the European minimum standard of four square metres per prisoner.[1]
Stays measured in weeks. Multiple complainants reported stays of two weeks to two months. The longest documented stay in the Alice Springs watchhouse was 52 days.[1]
Drinking water from fixtures atop toilets. In most cells in all three watchhouses examined, drinking water was provided only by bubblers built into the top of shared toilet fixtures — in cells where, at the peak, 17 people were sharing two toilets.[1]
Exposed, in-cell toilets with no privacy. Some prisoners used mattresses as makeshift screens. One interviewee described not using the toilet for 21 days to avoid doing so in front of other prisoners.[1]
No outside time. None of the three examined watchhouses had outdoor access. Time out of cell was, for most prisoners, limited to a shower at most every two days.[1]
Constant artificial light. At Palmerston and Katherine, cell lights were left on 24 hours. Prisoners used newspaper and toothpaste to block the light; others covered their faces with blankets.[1]
Women's hygiene. Female prisoners at Alice Springs reported having to hand-wash their bras and underwear in the shower. At Palmerston, soiled sanitary products were placed in a "body waste disposal bag" and handed back to a Corrections officer on request.[1]
Incidents. One prisoner at Palmerston sustained a partial finger amputation when a cell door closed on his hand while stepping over other prisoners sleeping on the floor.[1] At Palmerston in the review period alone, Corrections recorded 55 mental-health incidents, with 23 prisoners placed "at risk".[1]
One striking absence in the record: the Ombudsman received no direct complaints from Territory prisoners while they were still inside a watchhouse. Every complaint came via a lawyer, a family member, or after the person had been released or moved on.[1] In correctional centres, prisoners have a direct phone line to the Ombudsman's office. In watchhouses, they do not.
Against this backdrop, the NT Police Association — the industrial body that represents officers working these shifts — has publicly described watchhouse conditions as "officially out of control".[2] It is unusual for human-rights observers or legal-aid lawyers to describe a police facility as unacceptable. It is unusual for the union representing the officers on shift to say the same thing.
Children in the same buildings
The Acting Ombudsman's tabled report deals with adults. It is important to say this clearly, because it means the report does not settle a separate, parallel question about children held in the same facilities.
Reporting by the National Indigenous Times, based on records released to the NT Children's Commissioner, documented that between 25 August 2024 and 5 March 2025 the Palmerston watchhouse recorded 870 youth "custody events" involving 402 individual children.[3] Most of those children were held for 24 hours or less. Others were held for days. The longest youth stay on record during that period was 25 days.[3] The youngest children held at Palmerston during that period were 11 years old.[3]
That is below the minimum age of criminal responsibility in every other Australian jurisdiction where the question is settled, and below the age of criminal responsibility that the 2017 Northern Territory Royal Commission recommended be set as a minimum.[4]
This is not the subject of the November 2025 Ombudsman report. It is a separate investigation waiting to be done.
Why watchhouses are being used as prisons
The direct cause is capacity. NT prisons are full. In its correspondence to the Ombudsman, Corrections noted the prisoner population had increased by 18 per cent over the preceding 24 months;[1] the surge accelerated after the August 2024 election, which returned the Country Liberal Party with a "community safety" mandate, a round of bail-law changes, and a series of machinery-of-government reforms that split Corrections out as a standalone agency.[1][7] When the prison system reaches capacity, police watchhouses absorb the overflow.
At the peak of the review period, the Palmerston watchhouse held 197 prisoners in a facility Corrections had assessed at a maximum of around 160; the Alice Springs watchhouse held 117 prisoners in a facility NT Police told the Ombudsman had a recommended maximum of 61.[1] Corrections staff formally withdrew from the Palmerston watchhouse on 10 March 2025 and from the Alice Springs watchhouse on 14 March 2025, but the Palmerston watchhouse continued to hold Territory prisoners until 22 September 2025, and the Alice Springs and Katherine watchhouses continue to hold them today.[1]
The more interesting question is why this is the policy equilibrium, rather than a temporary emergency.
Policymakers are not unaware that watchhouses are unsuited to long-term detention. Every report commissioned on the subject — the 2017 Royal Commission, the Ombudsman, multiple coronial findings, and the NT Police Association's own public statements — has said so. The Ombudsman's office itself first wrote to the Corrections Commissioner about watchhouse conditions in April 2023, and repeated those concerns in June 2024.[1] The practical answer is that building a new prison, or reducing the number of people held on remand, both have political costs. Using watchhouses as an overflow valve has, until now, had almost none.
A cell designed to hold someone safely for six hours will not, through the addition of time, become a place where it is safe to be held for six days.
That is the policy choice we are describing when we say "watchhouse overcrowding". The overcrowding is the visible feature. The underlying choice is that it has been considered, and it has been allowed to continue.
What the law requires
Australia is a signatory to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and to the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT), which requires states to allow independent inspection of all places of detention. OPCAT implementation in Australia has been slow and uneven, and the NT — like several other jurisdictions — has not fully set up the inspection regime the treaty requires.[5]
Domestically, police in the NT operate under the Police Administration Act 1978, which provides for detention following arrest but sets out clear expectations about how quickly a detainee must either be brought before a court or released. The Act does not contemplate prolonged detention in police cells as a standard operating procedure.
Since 2019, the NT Custody Notification Service — run by the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) — has provided a partial backstop: whenever an Aboriginal person is taken into police custody, NAAJA is notified and legal assistance is offered.[6] That service was recommended by the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and is one of the few pieces of post-RCIADIC infrastructure that operates as designed. It does not, however, change the physical conditions of the cells. It ensures someone is told.
What accountability would look like
The Ombudsman has already said the most important thing: remove the long-term detainees, urgently. The other fifteen recommendations in the tabled report are concrete and practical — a four square metre minimum per prisoner, clean underwear, pillows or a suitable substitute, daily showers, telephone access to family, outdoor time. Corrections has accepted most. NT Police has declined the four square metre minimum and the outdoor-time recommendation, citing "operational" constraints.[1] That they feel they are able to decline these recommendations is itself a policy finding.
Beyond the Ombudsman's list, a coherent policy response would include:
1. A hard statutory cap on time in a watchhouse. Many overseas jurisdictions impose explicit limits — 24, 48 or 72 hours — after which detainees must be either transferred to a facility designed for longer-term custody or released. The NT does not have such a cap for all categories of detainee.
2. Independent, unannounced inspection. OPCAT-compliant National Preventive Mechanism arrangements for all NT places of detention, including watchhouses, with public reports. This is a treaty obligation the Commonwealth committed Australia to more than a decade ago.
3. Public data. Monthly publication of average and maximum time spent in each watchhouse, disaggregated by age, sex and Indigenous status. The Ombudsman's report makes clear that during the review period, Corrections was unable to produce this data on request. That is itself a problem. It should be published as a matter of routine.
4. Demand-side intervention. Watchhouse overcrowding is downstream of prison overcrowding, which is downstream of bail and remand settings. A bail regime under which more people are held on remand will produce more people in watchhouses, whatever is built. The traffic jam does not clear by widening the exit ramp.
These are not novel recommendations. They appear, in various forms, across two Royal Commissions, the Ombudsman's own reports, and decades of submissions from NAAJA, the Law Society, and the Australian Human Rights Commission. What is missing is not ideas. It is a political constituency for implementing them.
That constituency is, in the end, the readers of pieces like this one.
- Office of the Ombudsman, Northern Territory, Own motion investigation into conditions for Territory prisoners in Northern Territory Police Force watch houses — November 2025 (tabled in the Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory as Tabled Paper 573). Signed by Bronwyn Haack, Acting Ombudsman. All statistical and qualitative references in this section — the 31 complaints, the four-month review period of 1 November 2024 to 28 February 2025, the cell-capacity figures at Palmerston and Alice Springs, the 52-day longest recorded stay, the finger-amputation incident, the 55 mental-health incidents, the women's hygiene arrangements, the 24-hour lighting and drinking-water-from-bubblers-atop-toilets findings, the 18 per cent prisoner-population increase, the withdrawal dates and the 16 recommendations — are drawn from this report.
- NT Police Association, public statements on watchhouse conditions. See SBS NITV, "Officially out of control: NT Police union warns of serious risk in overcrowded police watch house". sbs.com.au/nitv
- Youth custody figures for Palmerston watchhouse, 25 August 2024 – 5 March 2025, as reported by National Indigenous Times, "Almost 400 Indigenous children held in NT's notorious watch houses in just six months", 28 July 2025, drawing on records released to the NT Children's Commissioner. nit.com.au
- Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory, Final Report, November 2017. royalcommission.gov.au
- Australian Human Rights Commission and Australian Association of Social Workers commentary on OPCAT implementation; see also background at the Commonwealth Ombudsman's NPM page.
- NAAJA, "About NAAJA". naaja.org.au
- For a useful year-in-review of NT bail, sentencing and human-rights developments in 2025, see "Law and order dominates 2025 as NT faces record incarceration and mounting human rights concerns", National Indigenous Times, December 2025. nit.com.au
◆ Corrections & feedback
If you believe any figure or characterisation in this piece is inaccurate, please email accountabilityforalice@proton.me. We publish every correction on the page where the error appeared.