Prison walls have failed miserably to stem the flow of illegal drugs into Australian correctional facilities, a new council report said on Tuesday.

The Australian National Council on Drugs (ANCD), which feeds the national government on its policies that combat the illicit drug business, faulted the current system in place on most of the country's prison facilities.

The council noted too that billions have been spent by federal authorities to ensure that drug addiction will be checked behind the fences that protect inmates but authorities' efforts went for naught, including measures to curb the use of alcohol and drugs by prisoners.

In Queensland alone, nine out of ten who were released from state prison facilities were said to have been rubbed upon by the harmful substance, which underscored the long-arm not of the law but of drug traffickers, the ANCD report said.

At the national level, the whole correctional system can be considered as rotten both in its approach and in terms of public accountability, the council said.

Per the ANCD report, some 80 per cent of Aussie prisoners were believed to be dealing with drug problems, yet prison authorities were not forthcoming enough in providing the exact details on the manner that they deal with the troubling indicator, according to ANCD researcher Kate Dolan.

"Some prison authorities are not revealing what programs they offer or what the results of their urine tests are or if they have evaluated a program what the results are . . . people would be surprised to know that it's not a transparent system in most states and territories," Ms Dolan told ABC on Tuesday.

She added that a great majority of presently imprisoned Australians were thought to be coping with smoking and alcohol issues, and just the same the public is clueless on how these problems were being dealt with.

And the root of all these concerns can be traced to prison officials' lack of reality grasp, which according to ANCD Executive Director Gino Vumbaca led to the denial of attendant issues that normally characterise the harsh prison life.

"What we're dealing with is the reality. You're going to have drug users in prison, you've got to provide programs to treat those problems as well as harm reduction measures to make sure people don't get Hep C or HIV while they're in prison," Mr Vumbaca told ABC on Tuesday.

He also assailed the seeming fixation of the penal system that simply plucks out offenders from the community without solid steps of actually rehabilitating them.

"If all you do is move people out the community who have committed a crime into a prison . . . and then just release them back . . . how does that make the community safer?" Mr Vumbaca asked.

The end-result is the inevitable waste of billons of dollars of taxpayers' money, he further pointed out.

The money would be of better use if poured on rehabilitation treatment programs for nonviolent drug users instead of keeping them behind bars, which the ANCD report said should be at the bottom list of federal and state authorities.

The council also recommended for the further strengthening of boot camp training in lieu of prison terms for youngsters victimised by the harmful substance, a tactic that the report said could likely reduce the incidence of drug addiction among teenagers.