On 30 June 2025, Victoria’s prison population was 6,593, an increase of 11.4% from the previous year. The increase was mostly due to unsentenced prisoners (people awaiting trial or sentencing). Their number went from 1,998 in 2024 to 2,588 in 2025, a 29.5% increase.
Our latest prison population report explores the changes in unsentenced and sentenced prisoner numbers in Victoria.
Number of people in Victoria’s prisons
Hover over the lines in the graph to display the year and number of people in prison for all prisoners, unsentenced prisoners and sentenced prisoners.
Sources: A. Freiberg and S. Ross, Sentencing Reform and Penal Change: The Victorian Experience (The Federation Press, 1999); Australian Bureau of Statistics, Prisoners in Australia (2025); Australian Institute of Criminology, Australian Prison Trends (1993).
Notes: The sentenced and unsentenced prisoner numbers may not add up to the total prisoner number because the total number includes post-sentence prisoners (prisoners who remain in custody after serving their prison sentence). Additionally, the numbers may be affected by small adjustments to the original data values to preserve confidentiality (‘statistical perturbation’): see Australian Bureau of Statistics, Prisoners in Australia Methodology (2025).
Prison population data for 1872, 1899 and 1900 is missing in the original source. The values given for these years are an average of the number of prisoners in the year immediately before and the year immediately after.
