Council Releases Fifth Report on Serious Offending Committed by People Serving a Community Correction Order

Date of Publication
29 March 2022

The Council has published its fifth report examining serious offending by people serving a community correction order (CCO) in Victoria. The series of reports now covers the financial years 2016–17 to 2020-21.

The report finds that 483 people were sentenced in 2020-21 for 640 charges of serious offending committed while serving a CCO. This was the lowest number of people and charges sentenced in the last five years. It is likely that the decline in numbers was due to continual COVID-19 restrictions and their effects on the Victorian Court system.

Despite the decline in raw numbers of people sentenced in 2020-21, the report finds that both the rate and the type of serious offending committed by people on a CCO have remained remarkably consistent for each year from 2016–17 to 2020-21. The estimated rate of contravention of a CCO by serious offending ranged from 1.6% to 1.7% in each of the five years to 30 June 2021, while the three most common serious offences sentenced each year were make threat to kill, make threat to inflict serious injury and aggravated burglary.

The report also finds that a growing percentage of people were sentenced for serious offending committed while serving a CCO that had been combined with a term of imprisonment (a ‘combined order’). In 2016-17, only 17.3% of people sentenced for serious offending on a CCO had been serving a combined order; however, this percentage increased with each successive year, peaking at 43.9% in 2020-21.

The report, Serious Offending by People Serving a Community Correction Order: 2020–21, and a complete list of offences defined as ‘serious offences’ are available for download from this website.