Napthine Government's tough stance on crime swells prisoner ranks The number of Victorians behind bars has passed 5600 for the first time in the state's history Source: News Corp Australia WOMEN and Koories are feeling the heat under the Napthine Government's tough on crime policies, with sharp rises in their numbers behind bars. The number of Victorians behind bars has passed 5600 for the first time in the state's history and is now growing at the rate of 100 inmates a month according to new figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics today. Victorian Council of Social Service CEO Emma King said the spiralling prison population showed the need for independent monitoring of what is happening inside jails. "Not knowing what is happening in our corrections system at a time when the prison population is at its highest point in a century is a recipe for expensive crisis responses down the track," Ms King said. If the State Government wants to pursue their tough-on-crime policies they should not be afraid of transparency and independent scrutiny of the consequences of those policies. The State Government recently announced that it would no longer publish the Statistical Profile of the Victorian Prison System that provides the most detailed picture of what is happening in the jails system. "In recent years, independent analysis of prisons data and inquiries by justice advocates have revealed issues such as the recent spate of deaths in prisons, shocking stories of young people in solitary confinement in adult prisons and spiralling rates of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C across the prison population," Ms King said. Ms King said the rise in female prisoners was of concern given many had some fairly tragic stories with backgrounds of domestic abuse or mental health issues. Being smart on crime is about more than locking people up. If we want to have a genuinely safer community we need to divert resources to tackle the causes rather than the consequences of crime. Corrections Minister Edward O'Donohue's spokesman James Talia said Victoria continues to have one of the lowest imprisonment rates for women and indigenous men in the country. He said the rate of growth for the female and indigenous prisoner populations had always been higher than for the male prisoner population because of their small size. "The government continues to work closely with the indigenous community to improve justice outcomes for Indigenous Victorians," he said. In March, the government signed the Aboriginal Justice Agreement Phase 3, which builds on the process started by the Victorian Government in 1997 to reduce the over-representation of Aboriginal Victorians in the justice system. Mr Talia said the government was delivering more targeted programs and rehabilitation supports for Koori prisoners and offenders on community based orders that gave judges greater scope to tailor orders to the individual circumstances to help prevent offenders from coming into further contact with the justice system. He said it was also "difficult to fathom criticism about the release of figures in a day when figures have been released. The ABS releases quarterly figures and the Productivity Commission releases annual figures - in both cases provided to them by Corrections Victoria. The latest ABS data reveals there was an average of 5504 inmates in the state's jails each day in the three months to September 30 - 557 more than for the same period last year, and almost 1000, or 21 per cent more than in 2010. The tally has risen every month this year to a historic high of 5608 in September. The average daily number of women in jail in the three months to September jumped 17 per cent to 395 - 57 more than for the same period last year. Koori inmates jumped 15 per cent, or 55, to 416. Men continue to account for the vast bulk of prisoners, with an 11 per cent rise in their numbers to 5110 - up 501 on the same period last year. In the first sign that police cell overcrowding has stabilised the number of unsentenced inmates fell slightly, from an average 1020 last year to 986. The number of people on community-based orders has risen slightly to 9185 a day on average in the past year but is still down on the daily average in 2010.