Corrections Minister Nick McKim says the move will be a triple-win: prisoners will be healthier, the occupational health and safety of prison guards will be improved and, when released, the newly smoke-free inmates won't be such a drain on the health system.

To implement the policy, Mr McKim has adopted the lessons of New Zealand's apparently successful move in 2011 to abolish smoking from all its prisons.

Presumably that includes a lesson on how to persevere with a policy decision even when your country's highest court has declared it unlawful.

In December last year, Arthur Taylor, an inmate at Auckland prison, successfully challenged the New Zealand law in that country's High Court.

Judge Murray Gilbert ruled the smoking ban was "unlawful, invalid and of no effect".

In his decision, Justice Gilbert said the smoking ban was not reasonably necessary to maintain the safety of prison staff and inmates, and did not serve a sentencing aim.

He said prisoners maintained all civil rights that were not explicitly taken from them by law and, as a person was allowed to smoke in their home, so a prisoner should be allowed to smoke in their cell.

The New Zealand government kept the ban in place with a bit of legislative fiddling and is awaiting another High Court decision to see if it owes compensation to prisoners for stopping them from smoking 18 months before passing the required laws.

It has hardly been a resounding success.

Still, the ban is popular with governments - prisons in the Northern Territory will go smoke- free from July 1 and Western Australian has also looked at the idea.

The praise of the anti-smoking lobby is worth more political points than preserving the already limited rights of prisoners.

At a press conference on Monday, Mr McKim dismissed the civil rights argument.

"People who are incarcerated in prison lose rights," he said.

"They lose the right to freedom, for example, one of the basic rights that we have."

The argument is apparently that compared to the loss of a big, fundamental right, like freedom, the loss of a little old right like the right to ingest legal substances is just peanuts. Why, I bet the prisoners will hardly notice!

After all, what better place to change behaviour than the regimented monotony of prison?

Most prisoners already undertake one or more of the eight behavioural modification programs offered by Tasmania Prison Service, ranging from substance abuse to anger management to sex offender rehabilitation programs.

To this the government will now add compulsory quit programs.

Hopefully prisoners manage to focus on changing actual illegal habits instead of being distracted by cravings for a legal substance that society now frowns upon.

A blanket ban will not stop smoking in prisons, it will just make cigarettes valuable contraband.

Workplace safety concerns could be managed by the introduction of a few designated smokers' areas, just like any other workplace.

Better health outcome for prisoners could be met by promoting the already available quit programs or upping the price of cigarettes from the prison canteen.

Smoking is the largest cause of preventable death in Australia.

According to Quitline, it causes one death every 28 minutes. As a health problem it should not be taken lightly.

But nor should the depravation of rights and, in its barest form, that's what this policy represents.

The automatic loss of some fundamental rights when you enter prison makes those that remain more valuable, not less.

We should not just throw them away.