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The Victorian government will spend $229 million on new prison beds, five times what it has allocated to programs aiming to keep people out of them.
The Victorian budget, handed down on Tuesday, details a steep increase in the Corrections budget and a sharp uptick in the number of people in prison in the state.
The number of people in prison in Victoria has increased by more than 16 per cent in the last year, with 7,297 people incarcerated around the state as of the end of March.
The government’s bail reforms have been the driving force behind this increase, while the number of young people in prison on remand has also increased significantly.
The 2026-27 budget allocates $229 million for the building of new prison beds in adult and youth facilities.
In contrast, $43 million will go towards programs aiming to reduce reoffending and keep people out of prison.
“Tough consequences for serious crime and programs that stop reoffending,” Victorian Minister for Corrections and Youth Justice Paul Hamer said in a statement.
“That’s what this budget delivers for community safety.”
Jesuit Social Services said that the budget was wasting money at the “wrong end of the system”.
“If we want to build stronger communities then we need fewer jail cells, and more mental health support, more housing and better primary schools in our most disadvantaged communities,” Jesuit Social Services CEO Julie Edwards said.
The Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service (VALS) criticised a lack of funding for First Nations legal services.
“The government can no longer claim that the harm caused by their policies and investments are ‘unintended consequences’, when it is clear the outcome will be the mass incarceration of our people,” VALS CEO Nerita Waight said.
The “tough-on-crime” policies from the state government last year led to a much higher spend on corrections than planned, the budget revealed.
The 2025-26 budget set aside $1.627 billion for “prisoner supervision and support”, but this has now increased to $1.764 billion.
The new budget allocates $1.692 billion to prisons in 2026-27.
The cost of youth custodial services also jumped in this time, from a predicted $274 million to $400 million, an increase of 13 per cent.
The Victorian government will spend an estimated $311.1 million on youth prisons in 2026-27.
The budget papers state that bail refusals and revocations are now at “record highs”, and that remand decisions have increased by nearly 70 per cent since its reforms were implemented.
A further $117 million will go towards a specialised, fast-tracked youth court court list at the County Court to implement the “Adult Time for Violent Crime” reforms.
The budget documents also reveal that people in prison in Victoria are set to get one hour less out of their cells each day.
While the government set a target of 10.5 hours out of cell for 2025-26, the actual figure is now 9.3 hours, with 9.5 out-of-cell hours predicted for the coming year.
This is because of changes to the minimum number of required hours out of cell in medium-security prisons, which began at the start of this year, the budget documents said.
The budget also included $125 million to increase the capacity of Thomas Embling forensic mental health hospital by 40 beds, and $10 million to maintain police watch houses and improve the level of healthcare offered to people held in them.
