Prison Sentences

(asked on 11th November 2014) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the highest number of concurrent prison sentences served by one offender at any one time was in each of the last five years.


Answered by
Mike Penning Portrait
Mike Penning
This question was answered on 21st November 2014

The court has discretion as to how sentences should be served. The independent Sentencing Council issued a guideline, Offences Taken Into Consideration and Totality, which all courts must follow so that there is a consistency of approach. The court has discretion as to whether or not to take offences into consideration (TICs), but where it does so the court should pass a total sentence which reflects all offending behaviour. The sentence must be just and proportionate and must not exceed the statutory maximum for the convicted offence. The guideline also says that there is no inflexible rule governing whether sentences should be structured as concurrent or consecutive components but, again, the overriding principle is that the overall sentence must be just and proportionate.

The Ministry of Justice Court Proceeding Database holds information on offences provided by the statute under which proceedings are brought but not all the specific circumstances of each case. Data on offences taken into consideration are not available from the information provided centrally to the Ministry of Justice. This detailed information is not reported to Justice Statistical Analytical Services due to their size and complexity and as such, it can only be obtained at disproportionate cost.

The Ministry of Justice’s extract of the Police National Computer (PNC) from which MoJ uses to publish official statistics on offenders’ criminal histories, while it holds information on those offenders who were cautioned or convicted for recordable offences in England and Wales, it does not in all (most) cases record data on’ disposal qualifiers’ the variable which allows us to identify concurrent prison sentences served.

Data on concurrent prison sentences served is therefore incomplete and unreliable. To provide the information requested, we would be required to contact all the courts in England and Wales and asking them to search individual case files in order to establish whether they hold information on concurrent prison sentences. To collate the information you require, would incur disproportionate cost.

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