Section 120 of the Constitution of Australia

Section 120 of the Constitution of Australia provides that Custody of offenders against laws of the Commonwealth Every State shall make provision for the detention in its prisons of persons accused or convicted of offences against the laws of the Commonwealth, and for the punishment of persons convicted of such offences, and the Parliament of the Commonwealth may make laws to give effect to this provision.

[3]: p 643 Indeed, the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) has on several occasions given consideration to the creation of a separate federal prison system but on each occasion has declined to recommend it, citing existing infrastructure, geographic dispersal and the relatively low number of federal offenders among its reasons for believing such a system to be inviable.

[2] The States must bear the cost of detaining and punishing federal prisoners, although this burden is lessened by grants from the Commonwealth.

[5]: p 135 In Leeth v Commonwealth, the High Court found that there was no requirement that prison conditions of federal prisoners be uniform across the Commonwealth.

Then Solicitor-General of Australia Justin Gleeson wrote that "at a practical level, it is hard to conceive how a state can sensibly run its prisons by according differential standards of treatment to prisoners depending upon whether the original crime was committed under federal or state law,"[6]: p 127  while Professor Matthew Groves of Monash University wrote that the present arrangement was preferable to avoid the "potential resentment and confusion in management that would be generated by enforcing two different regimes within one prison for similar classes of prisoners".