Every time a Victorian judge hands down a sentence, that decision sits inside a framework built — in part — by an independent body most Victorians have never heard of. The Sentencing Advisory Council (SAC) is not a court, it does not set mandatory penalties, and it does not prosecute anyone; what it does is arguably more influential than any of those things.
As VCN’s chief courts reporter, I have relied on SAC data and research for years to contextualise sentencing decisions, push back on political rhetoric about courts being “soft on crime”, and explain to readers why two people charged with the same offence can receive wildly different sentences. This explainer is designed to give journalists, advocates, researchers and curious readers the tools to do the same.
What is the Sentencing Advisory Council? #
The SAC was established under the Sentencing Advisory Council Act 2004 (Vic) as a statutory body sitting between the courts and the government. It is independent of both. Its members include legal practitioners, community representatives, criminologists, victims’ advocates and people with experience in corrections — a deliberately broad mix intended to prevent any single professional perspective from dominating.
The Council’s core functions, as set out in its enabling legislation, are threefold: to provide the Court of Appeal with community views on sentencing, to produce research and statistical analysis on sentencing patterns and practices, and to advise the Attorney-General on sentencing policy when asked — or when the Council considers it appropriate to act on its own motion.
It does not hear cases. It does not have the power to override a judicial decision. What it produces is evidence — the kind of structured, publicly available data that should anchor any serious conversation about how Victorian courts sentence offenders.
The research and advice function #
The SAC’s research arm produces detailed reports on specific sentencing questions, often at the request of the Attorney-General but sometimes on the Council’s own initiative. Past reports have examined topics including baseline sentencing for serious offences, community correction orders, the sentencing of children in the adult jurisdiction, and the treatment of prior criminal history in sentencing.
These reports are not merely academic exercises. When the Victorian government is considering legislative changes to sentencing law — increasing maximum penalties, creating new mandatory minimums, or reforming the parole system — the SAC is typically asked to model the likely impacts. Its findings feed directly into the policy process.
For journalists, these reports are gold. They are publicly available on the SAC website, written in comparatively accessible language (with technical appendices for those who want the methodology), and they carry the authority of a statutory body rather than a lobby group or think tank with an undisclosed agenda. When a politician claims courts are systematically failing to impose serious sentences for a given offence, a SAC report on that offence type will usually tell you whether the claim holds up.
Sentencing Snapshots: the data journalists use most #
The publication most frequently used by courts reporters and legal researchers is the Sentencing Snapshots series. Each Snapshot is a concise statistical profile — typically four to six pages — covering a single offence category: drug trafficking, sexual assault, robbery, culpable driving causing death, and dozens of others.
A Snapshot will typically tell you, for a defined reference period, what proportion of sentenced offenders received immediate imprisonment, what the median and mean sentence lengths were, what the most common principal sentence type was, and how those figures have shifted over time. They draw on data from the Victorian courts and are updated periodically as new sentencing data becomes available.
In practical terms: if VCN is covering a sentence handed down for aggravated burglary and a reader writes in to ask whether 18 months with a non-parole period of 12 months is “normal” or “lenient”, the relevant Sentencing Snapshot provides the statistical context to answer that question responsibly — rather than relying on gut instinct or political talking points.
It is worth emphasising what a Snapshot cannot tell you. It cannot explain why a specific sentence was imposed; that requires reading the sentencing remarks. It does not account for the enormous variability in individual cases — a median sentence for assault covers everything from a single punch to a prolonged attack, because the offence definition is broad. Used carefully, Snapshots illuminate patterns; used carelessly, they flatten the complexity that courts are designed to grapple with.
Community views and the Court of Appeal #
One of the SAC’s less well-known functions is its role in gauging community attitudes to sentencing. Victoria’s Sentencing Act 1991 requires courts to have regard to “current sentencing practices” and the views of the community; the SAC is the mechanism through which those views are formally researched and transmitted to the judiciary.
The SAC has conducted a number of large-scale community surveys asking Victorians what they think appropriate sentences look like for various offences. The consistent finding — reproduced across jurisdictions internationally — is that when members of the public are given the full facts of a case (rather than a headline summary), their instinctive view of what constitutes a fair sentence is much closer to what courts actually impose than media coverage or political debate would suggest.
This is significant for courts reporters. It means that the popular perception of a “lenient” judiciary is, at least in part, a perception built on incomplete information — and the SAC’s community research is the evidence base for that argument.
How the SAC fits into the broader sentencing landscape #
Victoria’s sentencing framework involves several actors operating in parallel. The Sentencing Act 1991 sets the statutory purposes of sentencing (punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation, denunciation, community protection) and defines the factors a court must consider. Legislation enacted by Parliament sets maximum — and in some cases, minimum — penalties for specific offences. The Court of Appeal issues guideline judgments that establish ranges and principles for trial courts. And the SAC sits across all of that, monitoring how the framework operates in practice, advising when it is not working as intended, and providing the data infrastructure the entire system depends on.
Parole decisions — which often generate as much public controversy as sentencing decisions — are made by the Adult Parole Board, a separate statutory body. The SAC does not oversee the Parole Board, though its research on post-sentence outcomes is relevant to parole policy debates.
How to access SAC resources #
Everything the SAC publishes is free and publicly available at sentencingcouncil.vic.gov.au. The site includes:
- The full Sentencing Snapshots library, searchable by offence type;
- Major research reports, with plain-language summaries;
- Statistical tables drawn from court sentencing data;
- An interactive sentencing statistics tool that allows users to filter by court, offence, year and sentence type;
- Submissions to parliamentary inquiries and government consultations;
- A glossary explaining sentencing terminology — useful for anyone new to covering courts.
Journalists new to the courts round should bookmark the SAC website alongside the Victorian Courts’ own publications. When a sentence provokes public controversy, the SAC data is usually the fastest route to calibrated, defensible context.
The limits of what SAC data can settle #
Statistical context is not the same as justification. A sentence that sits within the median range for its offence type can still be wrong on the specific facts of a case — and that is why the Court of Appeal exists. Equally, a sentence outside the statistical norm is not automatically a miscarriage of justice; individual circumstances can and should produce individualised outcomes.
SAC research also acknowledges, in several reports, that sentencing data reflects systemic inequities in who is prosecuted and for what. First Nations Victorians are significantly overrepresented in imprisonment statistics; women’s pathways into the justice system are often connected to histories of family violence and trauma. The SAC has examined these issues directly, and its reports provide a more nuanced picture than raw incarceration figures alone.
Understanding those limitations is part of using the data responsibly — which is, ultimately, what responsible courts reporting requires.
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