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Two men wanted for breaching serious sex offender supervision bonds have been taken into police custody in Ararat.
The city's police station confirmed the arrests at 12.40pm.
The two men, who escaped from residential facility Corella Place about 11.30pm on Wednesday, are serious sex offenders on supervision orders.
They were wearing electronic monitoring bracelets which sent an alert to staff when they fled the facility.
One of the men sexually assaulted a five-year-old boy at a shopping centre in 2004.
Less information is known about the offending of the other escapee.
A Corrections Victoria spokesman confirmed the men had "breached their court-ordered curfews and left the facility unaccompanied late last night".
Corrections was "supporting" police searching for the offenders.
The escape came just hours after Adrian Ernest Bayley was jailed for at least 35 years for the rape and murder of Jill Meagher. He was on parole when he raped and murdered the 29-year-old ABC employee in a Brunswick laneway last September.
There are 35 residents at Corella Place, including child sex offenders and rapists. They have finished their sentences but are considered unacceptable risks to community.
Corella Place is a residential facility that is next door to the Ararat prison, the Hopkins Correctional Centre.Corella Place is about 2 kilometres from the town centre.
Residents are housed in one, two and three-bedroom houses and have a strict curfew, but are taken on escorted trips to nearby towns and Melbourne.
Corrections Minister Edward O’Donohue announced in May that the residents would be the first to use GPS bracelets that could trace dangerous parolees or those on sex-offender supervision orders.
The existing bracelets use radio frequency technology that only flags when an offender is in a specific area and does not track them outside that zone.
The GPS bracelets that track the exact locations of people are scheduled to be introduced next month.