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New $500m NT prison opens in Darwin

Most new prisons probably don't open with a full bagpipe marching band and an Aboriginal smoking ceremony, but that was the welcome afforded to Darwin's $500 million jail.

Touted as the Northern Territory government's single largest infrastructure project, which will end up costing taxpayers $1.8 billion over the next 30 years, the Darwin Correctional Precinct was officially opened more than two months late on Monday.

The new site is the size of a city suburb and located about 30km east of the CBD, and the majority of the previous prison's inhabitants won't move in until independent inspections and final works are completed and certified.

The 1048-bed facility includes the NT's first 30-bed secure mental health unit, and a 48-bed pre-release work village which houses prisoners participating in the Sentenced to a Job program (STAJ).

They receive full-time wages for work ranging from food service to building fences for the new AACo abattoir, and they pay the prison weekly rent of $125.

"Nobody else in the community gets a free ride, so if someone is earning full-time wages they must make a contribution to their keep," Attorney-General and Corrections Minister John Elferink told reporters.

He has aggressively pursued the working prison model in an attempt to reduce recidivism, and says preliminary figures show the STAJ participants's recidivism rate is only 14 per cent, compared to about four times that for the general prison population.

"It's not the facility I would have designed, but it is what it is," he said of the previous Labor government-approved project.

"The best way to rehabilitation in the NT is by working and breaking the shackles of the welfare system that too often has gotten people into the corrections system ... We want to make sure prisoners get used to working inside and outside the wire so they can contribute to the community, their family and to themselves in a way they have never done before."

About 85 per cent of NT prisoners are indigenous, and Mr Elferink said this over-representation was partly due to a reliance on welfare.

"The best form of welfare is a job," he said.