Cost of crime crackdown criticised as Victoria prepares for influx of prisoners with huge jail spend
The cost of Victoria's crime crackdown is beginning to emerge, as the financially strained state government faces criticism over a $727m plan to expand prison capacity as the number of people on remand rises.
The premier, Jacinta Allan, visited the state's new Western Plains Correctional Centre on Tuesday to announce next week's state budget would include funding to open nearly 1,000 new adult prison beds and 88 youth justice beds, along with hundreds of new corrections staff.
Allan told reporters the increased capacity was needed following changes to the state's bail laws, which came into effect in March.
'Our tough new bail laws, they are working. We are seeing an increase on the number of alleged offenders on remand,' she said.
'We're backing that with more beds and more corrections staff.'
Government data for April shows a 22% rise in adults on remand and a 71% increase in young people compared with the same time last year.
Nerita Waight, chief executive of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service (Vals), said it was 'flawed, deeply troubling and misguided' to 'celebrate' growing remand numbers.
'This does not equate to community safety and only causes further distress, trauma and cycles of harm,' she said.
Waight said Vals' dedicated youth legal practice, Balit Ngulu, has seen a 300% increase in young people held on remand since June last year. For Vals' adult clients, there has been a 216% increase.
'In an already tight fiscal environment, today's announcement shows that premier Allan's invested in expanding prisons and not programmatic solutions that would create a safer Victoria for all of us, not just some of us,' she said.
Jesuit Social Services' chief executive Julie Edwards said the money was being spent at the 'wrong end of the system' and 'won't do anything' to prevent crime.
'We're really concerned by the news that the Victorian government is committing well over half a billion dollars of new funding to a costly, ineffective prison system which is at odds with all of the evidence about how to create stronger, more cohesive communities with less crime and fewer victims,' Edwards said.
Maggie Munn, first nations director at the Human Rights Law Centre, said the announcement was 'shameful' and urged more investment in housing, health and legal services instead.
Sarah Toohey from the Community Housing Industry Association Victoria said $727m would build more than 1,400 community housing properties for those in need, including people released from prison into homelessness, of which 40% are likely to reoffend.
'Investing in long term housing … is both crime prevention and a cost saving to government in prison spending,' Toohey said.
Asked if more funding for crime prevention would be in the budget, Allan said: 'We will have much more to say between now and next Tuesday.'
The $727m figure also matches the amount announced on Monday to 'switch on' the Metro Tunnel project and introduce high-frequency services on the Sunbury, Cranbourne and Pakenham lines.
Greens leader, Ellen Sandell, said the government had got their priorities 'all wrong' in the upcoming budget.
The $1bn Western Plains Correctional Centre, which has sat empty since it was completed in 2023, will open in July. It will replace the ageing Port Phillip prison, which is scheduled to close by the end of the year, and once fully operational will house up to 1,300 inmates.
Opposition police spokesperson David Southwick said the 1,000 new beds announced by the government only offset those being closed at Port Phillip. Other beds have also been closed at other prisons due to mould infestations, he added.
'They're throwing taxpayer money at the mess without a real plan to fix it,' he said.
The government also introduced new legislation on Tuesday to mandate additional jail time for prisoners who assault corrections staff.
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Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion The pair shared a love of rugby league and, when Luke started getting into some trouble as a teenager, Garry took him out on jobs as a carpenter. Eventually Luke became a site foreman for a construction company in Canberra. After he left home he regularly called his mum. 'You had to speak for no less than an hour,' Karen says, laughing. 'Otherwise I'd be accused of having something better to do.' In February 2022 Luke died, one day after he was remanded in custody at the Alexander Maconochie centre in the Australian Capital Territory. He had used a ligature point on the cell door – a point the prison had been warned could be used for that purpose seven years earlier. He was 27. 'At the time of Luke's death, the Territory chose to accommodate newly arrived detainees in a physical environment they knew to be, in one important aspect, unsafe,' the coroner Ken Archer said in his findings. In 2015 the prison's facilities management team suggested that the doors be reviewed due to the possibility a ligature could be tied to them. According to an investigation into Luke's death by the ACT custodial inspector, the cost of replacing the doors was estimated to be $610,000. Due to budget constraints, this was not done. The investigation found that ACT corrective services 'was aware of a serious design fault in the rear cell doors which had been known since 2015' and had failed to properly observe Luke, among other concerns. It recommended immediate action be taken to fix the doors. A spokesperson for ACT Corrective Services said upgrades to the doors had been completed in 2022 and a further review of the doors was under way. 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In Queensland the warnings about exposed bars were not isolated to Arthur Gorrie. A 2004 hanging death at Borallon correctional centre prompted a coroner to tell the state government to 'immediately cover with mesh any bars accessible to prisoners in cells'. Five years after that warning, another Borallon inmate hanged himself from exposed bars above his cell door. A hanging death at Townsville prison in 2007 prompted a warning that the Queensland government 'immediately' act on hanging points 'including bars' by replacing them with an alternative security barrier such as mesh. Two more hangings took place from exposed bars at Townsville in 2015 and 2019, roughly a decade after that warning. At Sydney's Long Bay correctional complex, there were three hangings from window bars in the metropolitan special programs centre, despite a warning in 2007 that the 'obvious' hanging points should be removed. Four hanging points at Adelaide's Yatala labour prison have been used in 11 deaths, despite repeated calls for their removal. Australian Institute of Criminology data shows hanging remains by far the most common method of self-inflicted death in custody. The data also shows the total number of prison hangings has crept back up to levels not seen since the early 2000s, with one now occurring on average every three weeks – likely due to the increased numbers of Australians being held in custody. Considerable progress to reduce the rate of hanging deaths was made between 2000 and 2008. But the data suggests that progress has stalled, remaining largely constant since then. Barnes, the former NSW and Queensland coroner, says the research is 'overwhelming' that preventing easy access to obvious hanging points is effective at reducing suicide. Many prisons move at-risk inmates to safer cells, which are more regularly monitored and have fewer ligature points. But Barnes says identifying suicide risk in a cohort of inmates is incredibly difficult, largely because the entire prison population is at elevated risk. That, he says, makes the removal of the hanging points all the more essential. 'It's very frustrating because you see so much money being spent building prisons and the like, and even new prisons that were being built didn't always eliminate hanging points,' he says. 'When you know that it's such an effective measure to take, it's really mind-boggling that they wouldn't do that. 'For coroners and people involved in suicide prevention, it's extremely frustrating.' As well as the failure to address ligature points, most cases reveal glaring deficiencies in mental healthcare and conditions in Australian prisons as well as a systemic lack of support and services for people in and out of custody. Mindy Sotiri, executive director of the Justice Reform initiative, has been campaigning for prison reform for more than 25 years. She has seen first-hand the 'inertia' that prevents meaningful change in this space – driven by public apathy and a lack of political leadership. 'There have been so many people who have been trying very hard to alert corrections of the dangers and the safety concerns for people inside,' she says. 'But there's just inertia on the part of corrections to respond, and such an absence of political will to see this issue as something that should be on the national cabinet agenda.' The cases investigated by Guardian Australia expose the crisis in stark terms. In 2015, after a hanging death at Arthur Gorrie, the state government told a coroner it was working to fix up 268 old cells. Six years later, after yet another hanging death there, the government was asked for an update on its progress. It said it still had 268 older-style cells at Arthur Gorrie to make safe. Not a single cell had been remediated in the six years between the two inquests. Guardian Australia approached every state and territory government in the country to ask why known hanging points weren't removed and what was being done to make cells safe. Every government said they were taking the issue of cell safety seriously and had invested significant funds in refurbishing old cells. Most also pointed to their attempts to improve the identification of at-risk inmates and provide them with treatment, supervision and monitoring. You can read the full responses from state departments here. Darren Muir knows first-hand what it's like to be in Arthur Gorrie. He spent two weeks there, locked in the same cells, with the same exposed bars, that his brother used eight years later to take his own life. The place nearly sent him crazy, he says. 'I'll give you one word: it's a fucking zoo, mate,' he said. 'That's how primitive that place was.' Darren says he believes his brother would not have accepted mental health treatment and probably would have found a way to take his life, even if the bars had been removed. But what he can't abide is the state government's failure to act on repeated warnings to remove the obvious hanging points, including after his brother's death. 'They're more or less handing them the rope,' he says. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
