We're the oldest supplier of products and services in New South Wales. Our story began with the first fleet and the hard and often cruel convict years.

In the mid to late eighteen hundreds, prison was a place of punishment and containment. Society honoured discipline and hard work. But labour conditions and terms of labour were often inhuman. With few exceptions, work was not to be offered to prisoners unless it was hard and punishing.

The first half of the twentieth century was fraught with war and depression. Prison reflected the outside world; a few farms offered redemption through work but brutality and despair grew. Work in prisons was mostly piecemeal and without organisation.

A crisis exploded in the early nineteen seventies with the riots at Bathurst. They led to a royal commission and extensive reforms. But work was not a significant factor in changing lives until the late nineteen eighties. CSI was formed and in the years since, a strong corporate identity has driven social and financial profits; inmates find new purpose through work, our clients and partners access an immense labour force and the system moves closer to self sufficiency.