That figure, revealed in the latest Productivity Commission report on government services was 52 per cent higher than the national average of $286 of recurrent spending per prisoner per day.

That higher cost likely partly reflects the growing population in the prison system and includes both capital and operating costs at the Alexander Maconochie Centre and Bimberi youth justice centre.

While the total cost of the ACT's corrections system rose from $48.6 million in 2011-12 to $68.6 million last year, it pales in comparison to the larger systems in other states, led by New South Wales' $1 billion-plus total operating expenditure.

The report also serves as a fresh reminder of the ACT's high rate of Indigenous imprisonment, despite the relatively small total prison population in Canberra, an issue reflected across the country, with indigenous Australians 11.4 times more likely to be in prison than non-indigenous people.

Indigenous Canberrans were 12.4 times more likely to be jailed than non-Indigenous residents, a ratio exceeded only by Western Australia's age-standardised imprisonment rate ratio of 14.9 last fiscal year.

The high rate of indigenous imprisonment in the territory was brought into sharp relief in May 2016, with the death of an indigenous inmate sparking an independent review and coronial inquest still underway.

Justice Minister Shane Rattenbury said the government had committed to "transformational change" in response to the death in custody, after the Moss Review highlighted widespread failings in the AMC, all of which have not yet been addressed.

He also said the government had recently received a report from a "feasibility study" into the AMC funded in last year's budget due to the continued rise in the prison population, particularly among female inmates.

The report showed the number of Indigenous offenders on community corrections orders has stayed relatively stable over the past decade; between 123 such offenders in 2007-08 and 169 last year.

But the number of non-Indigenous offenders in the community corrections system fell from 1173 in 2007-08 to 812 in 2016-17.

The territory's justice system also had the highest proportion of prisoners recorded as attending eligible education and training courses in the country in 2016-17, at 70.6 per cent, compared to the national average of 32.9 per cent.

The ACT also came in fourth for the percentage of prisoners employed in 2016-17, at 74.7 per cent of all inmates, behind Victoria, New South Wales and the Northern Territory.

The report also highlights what appears to be a rise over recent years of prisoner-on-prisoner assaults in the territory, with a rate of assaults in custody for every 100 inmates at 15.72 in 2016-17.

While that figure fell from a rate of 16.92 in 2015-16, it sat at 12.56 in 2014-15, while the rate of such assaults was only 5.43 and 3.76 in 2013-14 and 2012-13, respectively.

Inmates in the ACT were given 'time out of cells' for an average of 8.9 hours a day in 2016-17, a figure which has stayed fairly stable for the past five years, despite prisoners getting up to 14.9 hours out of their cells back in 2009-10.

Last year, the number of hours inmates were allowed out of cells in the ACT was the second-lowest of all jurisdictions for prisoners in 'open' areas of the jail, with most other jurisdictions reporting about 15 hours a day out of cells for those inmates.