In 2010 the then 300 bed Alexander Maconochie Centre was two years old, two thirds full and facing significant budget overruns.
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Local politicians, including Jeremy Hanson, were talking up the prospect of bringing inmates from across the border to make up the financial shortfall.
"We've got over 100 empty beds, just sitting idle at the jail," he said at the time.
"If we were to take about 100 prisoners from New South Wales and just bill them the same amount that they billed us (for ACT prisoners in NSW jails before the AMC was built) - that's $263 dollars a day - we would save the Territory's tax payers $9 million annually."
While well short of the $504 per prisoner per day the centre was costing the ACT, such a scheme would have offset the fixed overheads associated with Australia's first "human rights compliant prison".
Fast forward to 2017 and the situation is very different. The prison population grew by 95 per cent between 2010 and 2016, stretching its facilities to the limit.
Not even the opening of a new, $47 million, 112-bed cell block in 2016, was enough to prevent overcrowding, especially for female detainees who have been being incarcerated in unprecedented numbers.
A small number of male inmates had to be accommodated in the old Symonston detention centre in 2015 and 2016. This year female inmates have been temporarily housed in a "management unit" originally purpose built for "difficult" male inmates.
Other female prisoners have been bedded down in medical observation rooms in the health centre.
Plans are now in hand to "repurpose" existing accommodation to provide an additional 57 beds for female inmates.
Right now there are 482 beds for men and only 29 for women. Last week there were 427 men and 37 women in custody.
The ACT Government has responded to the crisis by mooting a possible expansion in the near future. It has already spent $275,000 on consultants to "explore the case" for further construction at the site.
The argument for expansion is, on the face of it, open and shut. If you build it they will come. If you don't build it they will keep coming anyway. In the meantime the overcrowding issues make it harder and harder for staff to deliver the pathways for rehabilitation and other innovations engineered into the original brief.
That said, given the obvious gap between what the original architects of the AMC concept were expecting and today's overcrowded reality, it is important any future build is based on the most accurate possible set of assumptions available.
Now on the cusp of its 10th birthday, the AMC appears ripe for a root and branch review that would identify what has worked; what hasn't and what the way forward should look like.
Let's not repeat past mistakes.
