Australian prisons held an average of 50,164 people a day in the June quarter, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures released in Canberra on Wednesday. It is the first time the quarterly average has passed 50,000, and it is up 7 per cent, or 3,245 people, on a year earlier.

The growth is heaviest among people who have not been sentenced. Of the 50,036 prisoners counted on the first day of each month, 21,659, or 43 per cent, were unsentenced, a rise of 9 per cent in a year. The sentenced count rose 5 per cent. In the March quarter of 2020, before the pandemic, unsentenced prisoners made up 35 per cent of the total. In the June quarter of 2021 there were 15,219 of them.

The national imprisonment rate reached 228 per 100,000 adults, up from 217 a year earlier.

Victoria recorded the sharpest rise. Its average daily prison count grew 15 per cent in a year to 7,447, and its unsentenced prisoners rose from 2,575 to 2,988. The state's second-strike bail rule took effect on 31 March, removing the presumption of bail for people who commit an indictable offence while already on bail for one. The Victorian Government said at the time the change "will result in more people in jail not on bail".

Queensland's count rose 8 per cent to 12,126 and New South Wales's 7 per cent to 14,208. Western Australia, at 8,632, was slightly lower than in the March quarter. The Northern Territory held 2,818 people, an imprisonment rate of 1,380 per 100,000 adults, more than six times the national figure.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people made up 37 per cent of the prison population. There were 18,396 Indigenous prisoners, 7 per cent more than a year earlier, a crude rate of 2,719 per 100,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults. In Victoria that rate rose from 1,643 to 1,974 per 100,000 in a year.

Under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, governments committed to cutting the Indigenous adult incarceration rate by at least 15 per cent by 2031. The Productivity Commission, which measures the target on an age-standardised basis rather than the crude rate the ABS reports, found the rate had risen from 1,925 per 100,000 in the 2019 baseline year to 2,500 at 30 June 2025, and assessed the target as worsening.

More people are also moving through prison gates. Receptions reached 21,148 in the quarter, up 12 per cent on a year earlier, and releases rose 14 per cent to 20,671. Outside prison, the number of people on community-based corrections orders fell slightly to 81,503, and community service orders dropped 8 per cent to 11,743.

The ABS will publish figures for the September quarter on 2 December.