Remand (Unsentenced) Prisoners — Methodology and Sources

What this measures

The number of Victorians held in custody on 30 June each year who have not yet been sentenced — i.e. detained while awaiting trial, plea, or sentencing. This is the remand (unsentenced) prison population.

A point-in-time stock measure (not a flow). Year labels are FY ending in the snapshot year (e.g., "2024-25" = 30 June 2025).

How values are derived

From Corrections Victoria's Monthly Time Series prison and community corrections data, Table 1 ("End of month number of people in prison by gender and warrant status"). The series runs monthly from July 1998 onwards; this chart samples the 30 June row each year, "Unsentenced - All people in prison" column.

The Corrections Vic series matches the Sentencing Council's "Victoria's Prison Population 2004 to 2024" report Figure 48 exactly for overlapping years, confirming both sources draw from the same Corrections Vic data system.

Reading the line

• 2015 → 2019: the unsentenced population roughly doubled from 1,433 to 2,973. The Sentencing Council identifies the 2013 and 2017–18 bail reforms as the major drivers. The 2017–18 reforms explicitly reversed the presumption of bail in expanded circumstances and were designed to "make it harder than ever to get bail" (following the Bourke Street tragedy).
• 2020: COVID-related drop to 2,484 — courts paused, and remand conditions during the pandemic placed unusual burdens on remandees, raising the threshold for refusing bail.
• 2021: peak of 3,185 (44% of the entire prison population was unsentenced).
• 2022 → 2024: drop to 1,994 — partly the 2023 Bail Amendment Act which restored some presumption of bail for low-level offending, partly faster court processing of the COVID backlog.
• 2024 → 2025: rebound to 2,586 (+30% in one year). The most recent monthly figures show the climb continuing — the April 2026 snapshot is 3,032, approaching the 2021 peak.

According to the Sentencing Council, "in 2023–24, 85% of people entering prison were received on remand, compared to 54% in 2004–05" — meaning remand has become the default path into custody.

Caveats

• Stock at 30 June, not an annual flow. Counts the people held at a specific moment, not the total number who passed through remand over the year.
• Excludes sentenced prisoners (whose count has run between 3,800 and 5,100 over the same period).
• The XLSX source is updated monthly by Corrections Vic; this site refreshes at each annual cycle but the underlying spreadsheet includes monthly granularity if a faster cadence is needed.

Sources

• Corrections Victoria — Monthly Time Series Prison and Community Corrections Data (Table 1)
• Sentencing Council Victoria — Victoria's Prison Population 2004 to 2024 (PDF, October 2025) — Figure 48 (cross-checks Corrections Vic series, matches exactly)