The government has also set aside $43 million to build new police stations, including a police station in Benalla and land for a future Yarra police precinct by amalgamating Fitzroy and Collingwood stations.
Attorney-General Jaclyn Symes said Labor was âinvesting where itâs needed to ensure our justice system is responsible and fair.
âOur investments provide targeted support for vulnerable Victorians while seeking to empower women, Aboriginal people, people with disability, older Victorians and children. Most importantly this budget will make sure all Victorians have access to justice.â
Loading
Courts will receive more than $210 million to boost online services in the Magistrates Court and the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, and provide additional resources for the County Count.
These changes have put a spiralling number of unsentenced remandees on low-level offences – people like Rachel – in jail at a rate that is fuelling concern about human rights, social impacts and the burgeoning cost to taxpayers. Women and indigenous Victorians have been especially affected. In April, for the first time, more women were in prison waiting for their charges to be heard than were there for actually committing and being sentenced for crimes. “The current provisions cast the net so wide that they’re catching people that shouldn’t be in custody – specifically, women who pose no threat to safety who are being placed in prison for low-level offending that is a direct result of their poverty and disadvantage,” said Elena Pappas, a spokeswoman for Smart Justice for Women, a coalition of 30 legal organisations.
Rachel was jailed for stealing an ice-cream. In Victoria. In 2020
Weâre sorry, this service is currently unavailable. Please try again later.
Dismiss
Save
Normal text size
Advertisement
Last year, Rachel was jailed for six days for stealing an ice-cream â a $3.50 Bubble OâBill from a St Kilda convenience store.
It was the kind of minor transgression that might once have prompted a stern reprimand from a police officer or a magistrate, but this was 2020 and Rachel was remanded because sheâd committed an indictable offence while already on bail. So under laws that Premier Daniel Andrews had spruiked as the toughest in the country, she spent two days in the custody centre and four in Dame Phyllis Frost prison in Ravenhall.
The Coroner s court said that it was concerning that the frequency of suicides among the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population in Victoria was twice that of the non-Indigenous community.
The court has reported Victoria had one of the highest rates of suicide for First Nations people in the country during 2020.
Latji Latji man Stephan Gocol from the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service at Mildura said the March visit from the court s Koori unit involved a community discussion. Educating people on suicide and then the flow-on effects of it, like the effect it has on the family, it would help deter it, Mr Gocol said.
Australia s Indigenous Deaths in Custody Continue to Prove Systemic Racism newsweek.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newsweek.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.