Crime goes down but prison numbers go up

Crime rates in Victoria have decreased by 8 percent in the last decade but the prison population has jumped by 35 percent.

The rapid increase in Victoria’s prison population over the last decade is not the result of an increase in the crime rate.

The crime rate in Victoria has dropped to its lowest amount since 2005, with a near-5 percent drop since last year.

The latest publication from the Crime Statistics Agency Victoria shows that the number of offences and criminal incidents in the state have dropped in the last 12 months.

While this is due in large part to a sharp drop in the number of pandemic-related offences recorded, the publication also shows that crime rates in the state are continuing to drop in the longer term.

But this has not been met with a corresponding drop in the number of people.

There were 474,446 reported offences in 2022, a 4.3 percent decrease from the previous year. This equates to a crime rate of 7196 per 100,000 people.

In 2012, the crime rate was 7519 offences per 100,000 people. 

This means there has been an 8 percent reduction in crime in Victoria when population increases are taken into account.

In the same time period, Victoria’s prison population has jumped by 35 percent, from 4882 people at the end of 2012 to 6632 people by the end of September 2022.

This is due largely to Victoria’s harsh and punitive bail laws, which have led to skyrocketing numbers of people being held in remand in the state’s prison.

People who have not been sentenced now make up nearly half of the people in prison in Victoria.

According to Corrections Victoria figures, there were 2879 unsentenced people in prison as of June this year, making up 44 percent of the total number of people in prison in the state. More than half of the women in prison in Victoria have not been sentenced.

The Yoorrook Justice Commission has been holding hearings into the impact of the criminal justice system on First Nations Victorians this week. The truth-telling commission has heard that the state’s bail laws are having a disproportionate impact on First Nations people.

Multiple organisations, including the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service and the Human Rights Law Centre, urged the newly elected Andrews government to urgently reform the “discriminatory” bail laws which are seeing unsentenced First Nations people being imprisoned at “alarming rates”.