Outrage after high-profile crimes such as those of rapist and murderer Adrian Bayley, Bourke Street mass killer James Gargasoulas and reports of worsening gang violence have led to a massive spike in police numbers and stringent new parole and bail laws, all supported by the Coalition. But most of those caught in the crime crackdown are not hardened criminals or sexual and violent attackers. Our prisons are increasingly populated by lower-level offenders on remand, ineligible for bail, unable to get a timely hearing or incapable of meeting conditions for their release such as stable housing. Criminal lawyer Jill Prior, now the principal legal officer for Law and Advocacy Centre for Women, has defended hundreds of women and men and is no less outraged by Bayley and Gargasoulas than the rest of us. But she has also seen up close the wider impacts on the crackdown on parole and bail – especially bail – triggered by the political and legal responses to their acts. “Those violent and unpredictable offences are outliers but the laws made in response to them are catching everyone." That is especially so for imprisoned women, many of whom are also victims of male violence.

While the Coalition is traditionally the party of law and order, in truth the “tough on crime” attitude in Victoria is bipartisan. And very expensive. The billions of dollars being spent on prisons are billions not spent on other services, including those like housing and mental health programs that can help keep people out of trouble. Officer Jessie Reid with Bronco the Belgian Shepherd at Victoria's 24-hour emergency rapid-response base at the Metropolitan Remand Centre in Ravenhall. Credit:AAP Last year Matthew Guy’s Liberals campaigned hard on law and order but were trounced at the November poll. Community safety was front and centre in the media but voters were more interested in transport, hospitals and schools. In the competition over who is toughest on crime, Labor and the Coalition have left the state with a big headache, and privately both sides admit it: many Victorians are in jail who shouldn’t be, and increasingly, we can’t afford it.

But what to do? Having declared a war on crime, is there any going back? The corrections conundrum As The Age revealed on Friday, the government expects there will be 11,130 citizens behind bars in four years time, nearly twice the prison population in 2014. Loading The proportion of people inside is now on par with late 19th century colonial times. It took Victoria 160 years to build a prison population of 5000 but it will take just 10 years to double that number. The annual cost of running the state’s prisons is now more than $1.6 billion, triple the outlay in 2009-2010. And to pay for the burgeoning numbers, the government announced a record $1.8 billion in new capital spending on prison infrastructure over four years in the May budget in a bid to accommodate 1600 more prisoners.

This comes after successive Labor and Liberal governments have devoted billions of dollars to the almost constant building of jails over the past 20 years. The surge will stretch the capacity of the corrections system over the next four years despite plans to install hundreds of new beds and cells in existing facilities, and the decision to expand and accelerate plans for a massive new prison near Geelong. The need to feed and house all these prisoners has led to the creation of a dedicated precinct in the suburb of Ravenhall in the city's west, which has a physical footprint and population the size of a small town. Nearly 2800 prisoners and 750 staff live or work at the Metropolitan Remand Centre, Ravenhall prison and Dame Phyllis Frost Centre. The three facilities sprawl over an area equivalent to the University of Melbourne campus and Melbourne General Cemetery combined. Corrections Victoria, which manages the prison system, has confirmed it is also looking for sites for yet more facilities beyond 2023. The increase in prison spending far outstrips that on services, including for schools, hospitals and social housing.

Whether it is effective spending is highly debatable. Victoria spends an average of $323 a day its prisoners, far more than any other state or territory – and the outlay is still rising. This week both Corrections Minister Ben Carroll and Corrections Commissioner Emma Cassar defended the comparatively high spending on prisoners, noting that Victoria spends more than other states on “out of cell” time for prisoners, including welfare and educational programs that help rehabilitation.

Despite the investment, half of all prisoners ultimately reoffend and return to prison, which is a key performance indicator for the corrections system. In Victoria, about 43.7 per cent of prisoners return to custody within two years. Our recidivism rate is only marginally better than the national average of 45.6 per cent. The Law Institute is among the many groups arguing that imprisonment and crime rates are not connected, and that locking people up does not necessarily lead to a reduction in crime. Back to the future Victoria hasn’t always had such a corrections problem.

Early records from the frontier days of the 1870s reveal an imprisonment rate of just over 210 per 100,000 people, a rate that steadily declined throughout the 20th century to a remarkable low - by today’s standards - of just 38 per 100,000 in 1977. Notably this figure was achieved after more than two decades of continuous conservative, not Labor, government. The Coalition has campaigned relentlessly around crime in recent elections but no more so than last year. It was not always so shrill.

In the late 1970s something changed in government and public attitudes. The long downward trend in the imprisonment rate turned upwards and has continued to climb at an ever more steeply since. Why is hard to say. But the change coincided with the end of the post-war economic boom and bipartisan agreement on the welfare state, and the beginning of a gradual decline in our trust in government and institutions. An increasingly risk-averse society started to see incarceration is a default for offenders rather than a last resort. Arie Freiberg is the veteran chairman of the Sentencing Advisory Council. He has pondered the question of the shift in attitudes to law and order and the impact on the “penal climate”. He points first to the increasing hysteria from some sections of the media in the reporting around crime. “The way some media highlight events affects peoples’ tolerance of adverse events and their aversion to risk,” Freiberg says.

“I think over the years that sensitivity and aversion to risk has really made crime and law and order salient issues.” Freiberg says politicians and police are affected by the media and public mood. Judges too, indirectly. “Maybe when in doubt, don't let them out," Freiberg says. The warming "penal climate" has contributed to decades of legislative and other changes that have driven up the imprisonment rate, including the abolition of remission (release for good behaviour), the scrapping of suspended sentences and more recent toughening of parole and bail, as well as increased police numbers. A genuine desire to protect public safety in the wake of a high-profile crimes – as well as a renewed focus on ensuring victims are heard by the system – have also driven some of these reforms. But, whatever the reasons, the uncomfortable truth is that Victoria now has the per capita imprisonment rate it had in the 1890s and will soon be back to 1870s-like numbers.

Bursting at the seams The major new challenge flowing from recent toughening of laws is the explosion in the number of people on remand. Hundreds of men and women recently charged with crimes or awaiting trial are now squeezed into the prison system who would not have been before it became so difficult to get bail. Lawyers, magistrates and police across the system complain that low-level, non-violent alleged offenders are being locked up at great cost to taxpayers, remandees themselves and their families. Jill Prior’s legal service has acted for about 500 women in the past two and a half years. Most were not convicted for serious violent offences. "If they were properly supported in our community, the risk of offending for most of those women would be really diminished," she says.

Remandees remain innocent until found otherwise so have to be housed away from sentenced prisoners. That means special, well-located facilities that allow ready access to lawyers services and families. It is an especially costly business. And the surge in offenders on remand is having serious flow-on consequences for the courts, including slow-downs in processing cases when offenders are delivered late, or don’t arrive at all, for hearings. Exterior of the Metropolitan Remand Centre in Ravenhall. Credit:AAP What's next? To date the government has resisted calls by lawyers and others for a tweaking of bail laws to lower the pressure on prisons, police and courts, and on the families of many inmates locked away when in the past they would have been out.

While Labor has welcomed debate around law and order in a cooler penal climate post-election, it is showing no signs of revisiting key decisions, notably its bail reforms. Loading This week Attorney-General Jill Hennessy insisted that the 2017 bail changes had “increased community safety by making it harder for serious and repeat offenders to get bail”. “There are no plans to make changes to these laws,” she said. However Corrections Minister Ben Carroll confirmed he is considering a review of the Corrections Act which had not been updated for more than 30 years. He says he is considering reworking the Act to make rehabilitation of prisoners a core objective of imprisonment.

The idea is that a greater focus on rehabilitation, including through education opportunities, would help ensure prisoners did not reoffend and return to prison. The government has also highlighted the $93.2 million in the budget for programs and services focused on keeping people out of prison, including $20 million to reduce the incarceration of women, $23 million for diversion, rehabilitation and reintegration programs. Carroll says he has been looking to the Norwegian corrections system, among others, for inspiration. Norway is celebrated for its preventative approach including small facilities within communities designed to replicate non-prison life as closely as possible, and housing for all prisoners on release. It spends considerably more per prisoner on corrections than Australia and most other countries. And it has a recidivism rate of just 20 per cent less than half the Australian rate.

But if the Andrews government aspires to a Norwegian-like corrections system it’s got a lot of work and spending to do, especially on housing. Victims' rights advocates are also unlikely to welcome a system with a renewed focus on the interests of prisoners. Freiberg is not sure Australia is culturally conducive to Norway’s more liberal penal philosophies and practices. “You would then get some commentators talking about ‘holiday camps’ and the like,” he warns. Still, he has no doubt that spending ever more billions of dollars on prisons is not the answer.

He stresses what Labor MPs should know instinctively. The vast majority of those in prison are poor, and poorly educated, many have intellectual disabilities, far too many are indigenous, and most have abused alcohol and/or drugs. ”Could that $1.8 billion be spent more wisely?" he asks. "Give it to me and I’d spend it on public housing, education, health and child safety.”