Victoria spends 25 times more to jail prisoners for a year than it does to fund community-based services to help would-be prisoners rebuild their lives.

This, says Victoria's deputy chief magistrate Jelena Popovic, is proof the state has lessons to learn about how best to rehabilitate people charged with crimes.

"We are looking at short-term solutions and warehousing people to keep them out of the community and keep them out of trouble," Ms Popovic said.

"We should be investing our money in education and working with our families to help them make changes."

It costs an average $100,000 to jail a man for a year, Ms Popovic said (women cost about $115,000 a year).

In contrast, the Court Integrated Services Program (CISP), which links people to drug and alcohol, housing, crisis and other services and offers individual case management to help them reduce their offending, costs about $4000 for four months.

"Even if you're spending $4000 two or three times, you're still out ahead," Ms Popovic said.

"If you can keep people out of prison you're saving the community a lot of money – I don't think people understand how much imprisonment costs."

Ms Popovic, who is also co-ordinator of the Koori Court division of the Magistrates Court, will speak on Thursday at the Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration's conference on Indigenous justice in Alice Springs.

She will use her speech to call for Victoria to take lessons from other jurisdictions that are trialling so-called "justice reinvestment" measures, that redirect money and resources from policing and prisons to social measures to try to keep people out of jail in the first place.

"Justice reinvestment is a movement that started in the far-right of the United States and was actually started by Jeb Bush and people that he was close to in the Republican Party, where they just took the view that what they were spending in Texas on prisons was ridiculous, and that maybe they should be thinking about – purely from an economical rationalist's point of view – reinvesting the money from prisons into social programs, such as rehabilitation," Ms Popovic told Fairfax.

"They've closed prisons in Texas as a result. And they've reduced crime."

She praised the investment made by Victorian governments into rehabilitation services and court programs designed to help people on remand access services, but backed comments made recently by Victoria's Ombudsman Deborah Glass, who called on legislators to take a longer-term view of law and order.

"We're spending more money on more people going to prison, and they're coming back more often," Ms Glass said.

"That is a compelling picture of something not working. I think it is about rethinking the view of crime and offending, and taking a long-term view rather than a short-term, headline-grabbing view of crime."

Last year, Ms Glass handed down a report into Victoria's prison system that showed the current approach was failing to address repeat offending, with one in two prisoners returning to jail within two years of release.

"We cannot keep pouring funds into a correctional system that is not making us safer", Ms Glass wrote.

"If we continue in this way, current trends in both prisoner numbers and cost mean it will not be long before we have to make hard decisions between prison beds or hospital beds, better schools or more security."