Written question asked by Alan Duncan (Conservative) on Wednesday, 10 February 2010, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Monday, 22 February 2010. It was answered by Maria Eagle (Labour) on Wednesday, 24 February 2010 on behalf of the Ministry of Justice.

Prison Sentences

Question: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice how many (a) UK, (b) Irish and (c) other EEA nationals are serving a sentence of (i) mandatory life imprisonment, (ii) discretionary life imprisonment and (iii) imprisonment for public protection.

Answer

The following table shows the numbers of British, Irish and other EEA nationals serving mandatory life sentences, other life sentences (including discretionary life imprisonment) and indeterminate sentences for public protection (IPP) in prison establishments in England and Wales as at 30 June 2009. These are the latest available data.

	British nationals	Irish nationals	Other EEA nationals
Mandatory lifers	4,381	55	67
Other lifers	2,263	24	12
IPPs	4,882	38	63

The figures on mandatory and other lifers have been drawn from the prison IT system. The IPP figures were taken from the Public Protection Unit Database (PPUD) in the National Offender Management Service. The PPUD is a live database, updated on a regular basis. Data taken from the database on consecutive days will contain differences reflecting updates.Both the prison IT system and the PPUD are administrative systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.

Secondary information

Type: Written question
Reference: 506 c583-4W; 318048
Session: 2009-10
Subjects: Prison sentences EEA nationals
Contains statistics: Yes
Link: View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk

Prison Sentences

Secondary information

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