VICTORIAN Minister for Corrections, Bob Cameron says a State initiative to put criminal offenders to good use by removing graffiti has reached a milestone.
According to the Minister, the State’s Graffiti Removal Program has currently removed 500,000 square metres of graffiti. The initiative works to deter re-offending and works to improve offenders’ sense of community respect, responsibility and community pride.
The Minister says, such is the level of graffiti it could almost cover the MCG playing fields 25 times by the amount of graffiti cleaned off property and removed from Victorian neighbourhoods in the last three and a half years.
The program is part of the States $4.5m Graffiti Prevention and Removal Strategy announced in the May budget, after the Graffiti Prevention Act was penned last year, which created graffiti-specific offences for marking graffiti.
Managed by Community Correctional Services (CCS), the program puts offenders on court imposed orders to work cleaning graffiti from public and council assets to pay their debt to the community. Around 10,000 offenders have already clocked up more than 178,000 hours cleaning graffiti since the program began in late 2005.
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