Changes to the Corrective Services Act

The Changes

Last year the Queensland Government passed the Corrective Services (Promoting Safety) and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024. Among other things, it amends the Corrective Services Act 2006 to “strengthen powers to respond to abuse of prisoner communication channels”.

S52A of the Act is titled “Offence by prisoner relating to diversion of personal call” and states “A prisoner must not intentionally continue with a personal call the prisoner knows is diverted“. The maximum penalty for the offence is six months imprisonment.

Corrections have confirmed that our PrisonConnect service will be considered a diversion under this section of the Act and the service (as-is) will be no longer be allowed.

The issue is that our service forwards the call from the local landline number to your mobile number over the mobile phone network and that is a “diversion” even if the person the inmate is talking to is the person the prison approved.

Introducing PrisonConnect Cloud

To solve the problem we’ve introduced a new app-based service called PrisonConnect Cloud.

PrisonConnect Cloud is a fixed termination service that sends your call to an app rather than your mobile number. This means there are no forwarded calls or redirections so it’s compliant with the new legislation.

Best of all, you can switch your existing PrisonConnect service to Cloud so you don’t have to get a new number.

Click here to find out more about PrisonConnect Cloud.

The new rules will start being progressively enforced from June 2025 as the department rolls out a new digital prisoner telephone system.

There’s a flyer about the new system on the Corrective Services website.