Prisoners shouldn't have time shaved off their sentences for good behaviour during emergencies, a coalition has argued in its latest election pledge.
Convicted criminals in Victoria can receive compensatory sentence discounts for good behaviour in unforeseen circumstances, such as industrial disputes and lockdowns, known as emergency management days.
The only laws of their kind in Australia, those measures would be abolished if the state's opposition is able to depose the Labor government at the November election.
“Labor’s freebie sentence reductions do not meet community expectations and are out of step with other states," opposition police and corrections spokesman Brad Battin said on Sunday.
Collectively, nearly 2300 years were scrubbed from inmates' prison terms over a four-year period due to the scheme, according to Freedom of Information documents released to the coalition.
Those reductions were afforded to offenders, including killers, rapists and pedophiles, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when prisoners were automatically handed four days off their sentences for every day of lockdown endured by Victorians.
Convicted murderer Shane Robertson, who brutally bashed his partner Katie Haley to death in 2018, had 14 months wiped from his sentence owing to COVID-era emergency management days.
Ms Haley's father and sister, Boyd and Bianca Unwin, have since led the campaign to scrap the controversial law.
Automatic granting of COVID-related emergency management days ended in February 2023, with prisoners now required to apply for them.
Labelling the coalition's pledge a straw-man policy, a Victorian government spokesperson said the coalition was "stuck relitigating COVID".
"If (Opposition Leader) Jess Wilson really cared about community safety, she’d explain how her 31,000 frontline job cuts won’t gut our police, prisons, and courts."
In 2021, the then-federal coalition government amended legislation to stop commonwealth inmates from accruing emergency management day credits in Victorian prisons and retrospectively repealed existing discounts.
