And two out of five prisoners wind up back behind bars.

For the first time official ACT government figures paint a picture of cycles of crime in the territory.

The Justice and Community Safety Directorate released the figures in its 2011-12 annual report, but warned they were ''a very basic tool for measuring what is typically a very complex issue''.

The figures relate to prisoners who left the Alexander Maconochie Centre in 2009-10 - the first full financial year of operations for the human rights compliant jail - and returned within two years.

Of those prisoners who walked out of the prison's gates in 2009-10, 56 per cent were back in the corrections system, either in custody or in the community, within two years.

Slightly more than 40 per cent of offenders went back to jail.

One in five offenders who finished a community-based sentence in 2009-10 fell foul of the law within two years, and almost 19 per cent were serving another community-based penalty.

The ACT Greens compared the new figures against the most recent interstate data from 2010-11, acknowledging the analysis was ''ball park'' rather than a direct comparison.

The comparison suggests the territory had the worst rate of people finishing a custodial sentence and finding themselves back in the broader corrections system, including community-based sentences.

But it also pointed to the country's lowest recidivism rate for offenders finishing a community order and later finding themselves back in the broader system.

Politicians from all three parties agreed it was too early to jump to conclusions about trends.

Greens justice spokesman Shane Rattenbury said: ''We'll probably be in a better position in the next few years when we will start to see trends and be able to look back and see whether the ACT is making progress on the benchmarks that have been set earlier.''

Canberra Liberals' prison spokesman Jeremy Hanson agreed, but accused the ACT government of fostering a poor culture at the prison and attacked its plan to trial a needle and syringe exchange program.

''If you don't get the prisoners off drugs, when you've got 75 per cent attributing their crimes to their addictions, then you're simply going to have a revolving door at the jail,'' he said.

Mr Rattenbury said tackling cycles of crime required a holistic approach. ''It's about ensuring that people have housing, it's about access to work and training and those sorts of things,'' he said.

A spokesman for Corrections Minister Chris Bourke said it would take time for the results to become meaningful, but the government expected improvement.

''We're fine-tuning a range of programs… The Solaris therapeutic community, it's now had 13 graduations, and the transitional release centre is working well,'' he said.

The directorate's report said the territory's low incarceration rate might distort the recidivism figures. ''In the ACT, low detention rates mean that the AMC has a higher percentage of offenders with a medium to high risk of re-offence.'' .