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Victoria's Prison Population: 2001 to 2006

Today the Sentencing Advisory Council released a brief information paper on Victoria's prison population during the period 2001 to 2006. The paper examines trends in published and unpublished data from prisons, the courts and police in order to identify key contributors to Victoria’s rising prison population over the period 2001 to 2006.

Victoria’s prison population increased by 15.2% over this period, from 3,391 on 30 June 2001 to 3,905 on 30 June 2006. The main contributing factor highlighted in the paper is the length of stay in prison, with the average expected time to serve among sentenced prisoners increasing by 17.9%. This is reflected in sentencing practices whereby the average length of imprisonment sentences handed down in court rose by 18.7%, most of which was due to the 12.4% rise in imprisonment sentence lengths in the higher courts.

Factors examined that appeared not to have an impact on the rise in the prison population were: the overall crime rate; the custody rate (proportion of all sentences that were custodial sentences); and the number of prisoners received into prison.