Prisons, like hospitals and schools, are institutions of care that are subject to high expectations of public confidence, yet prisons remain one of the least transparent institutions in our communities. Feeling and—actually being—safe are fundamental to any model of care, and failures to maintain safety in carceral settings yield significant human costs with regard to the health of individual prisoners and staff, and the health of their communities. Promoting and ensuring safety (e.g., from violence), then, is not just the concern of people who work and live in prisons—it is everyone's concern. Drawing on research, experiences and insights across jurisdictions, we argue (1) that there are no simple universal answers to addressing compromises to safety in prisons nor to making prisons safer, but that (2) reframing prisons’ prioritisation of containment and rehabilitation toward also developing people who become thriving contributors to the community is called for, and (3) that inviting community into prison facilitates thriving. Thriving, as a conceptual frame, is used here to open up new areas of inquiry, think beyond the traditional role of prisons as places of containment, and meet urgency with hope.