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Prison Sentences

Answer

The Ministry of Justice routinely publishes data in Offender Management Statistics Quarterly (OMSQ) on the prison population.

Table 1: Number of prisoners serving life sentence who were aged 25 years or younger at sentencing, with a tariff of 25 years or more, broken down by sex, ethnicity and imprisonment status.

	Ethnicity	Status	30/06/22	30/06/23	30/06/24	20/06/25
Male	Asian/Asian British	Unreleased Life	153	177	203	205
	Black/Black British	Unreleased Life	487	521	578	612
	Mixed	Unreleased Life	142	155	174	192
	Not stated	Unreleased Life	*	*	5	3
	Other ethnic group	Unreleased Life	24	24	27	28
	Unrecorded	Unreleased Life	*	*	11	4
	White	Unreleased Life	742	777	796	814
Female	Asian/Asian British	Unreleased Life	3	3	4	5
	Black/Black British	Unreleased Life	*	*	3	3
	Mixed	Unreleased Life	*	*	*	*
	Not Stated	Unreleased Life	0	0	0	0
	Other ethnic group	Unreleased Life	0	*	*	*
	Unrecorded	Unreleased Life	0	0	0	0
	White	Unreleased Life	31	34	37	39

Table notes:

1. Tariff length is the time between date of sentencing and tariff expiry date, and does not take into account any time served on remand.

2. Offenders who are 25 years old or younger at sentencing includes everyone not yet 26 years old at sentencing.

3. Figures include offenders who received a Whole Life Order.

Disclosure control

An asterisk (*) has been used to suppress values of two or one. This is to prevent disclosure of individual information. Further disclosure control may be completed where this alone is not sufficient.

Source: Prison NOMIS and Public Protection Unit Database

Data sources and quality

The figures in the above tables 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

HL13097

Session

2024-26

Subjects

Prison sentences

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.parliament.uk