The
area can hold 75 alleged offenders but yesterday there was 98,
forcing staff to relocate 23 people to cells housing convicted
criminals.The head lawyer of the Territory's peak Aboriginal legal body says Berrimah's remand area is over-flowing and is like a cage.
Glen Dooley from the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency says he visited Berrimah at the weekend and at least 80 alleged offenders were being held in the remand area, but he has been told it is designed to hold 54 people.
Mr Dooley says he was told that at least seven or eight of the those men were mentally unwell and should not have been put there in the first place.
"You'd have to call it a cage where the prisoners are kept," he said.
"It's such a large number of men compressed into such a small space you think to yourself if something was to go wrong in there and someone was to lose the plot with another person and something happened, I mean you would just think that the prisoners themselves would be at great risk and how the prison guards are meant to get in there sort it out."
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department says there is flexibility within the jail to accommodate extra remand prisoners.
She says security of the prison, the inmates and staff is a top priority at all times.
Source: ABC