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Prisoners

Answer

Whilst crime is falling, since 2010 offenders are more likely to go to prison and for longer. Sentencing in individual cases is a matter for our independent judiciary, taking account of all the circumstances of each case.

The Government has reformed how short custodial sentences are served. Under the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014, all those serving custodial sentences must now be subject to 12 months of supervision following their release. This means that sentenced offenders leaving prison will spend at least 12 months under supervision, and they will be liable to be sent back to prison if they breach their conditions, where previously around 45,000 prisoners have been released each year with no statutory oversight.

These new statutory requirements have been combined with a significant new approach to rehabilitation under which Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) – which bring together the best of the public, private and voluntary sectors – are working in new and innovative ways to tackle re-offending, and will be paid according to the results they achieve.

Latest available information on the number of prisoners serving an immediate custodial sentence of 12 months or less, by offence group, in England and Wales can be viewed in the table below.

Prison population serving a sentence of 12 months or less by offence group, 2014, England and Wales
	31-Dec-13	31-Mar-14	30-Jun-14	30-Sep-14	31-Dec-14
Violence against the person	1,635	1,682	1,704	1,725	1,682
Sexual offences	317	328	302	320	295
Robbery	174	160	147	118	90
Burglary	551	535	491	..	..
Theft and handling	2,282	2,372	2,270	..	..
Fraud and forgery	262	262	236	211	225
Drug offences	356	413	398	381	332
Motoring offences	390	434	430	413	403
Other offences	1,724	1,872	1,800	1,824	1,681
Offence not recorded	67	122	115	109	68
Total	7,758	8,180	7,893	7,792	7,218
Data Sources and Quality
Due to continuing problems with data quality, reporting on the populations in the 'Burglary' and 'Theft and Handling' offence groups has been disrupted between 1 July and 31 December 2014. This is because, for statistical purposes only, some prisoners have been mis-allocated between these two offence groups. The reporting of these figures has therefore been postponed pending further investigation. These figures have been drawn from administrative IT 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

228796

Session

2014-15

Subjects

Prisoners Sentencing

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.parliament.uk