Reoffenders: Prisoners' Release

(asked on 20th March 2020) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many serious further offences were committed by offenders that were automatically released from prison in each of the last three years.


Answered by
Lucy Frazer Portrait
Lucy Frazer
Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
This question was answered on 30th March 2020

Serious Further Offences (SFOs) are rare. Less than 0.5% of offenders under statutory supervision are convicted of an SFO; for murder, the proportion will be lower. Nonetheless, every single SFO is taken extremely seriously, and in all cases a review is carried out to identify any necessary actions which need to be taken to improve the management of other cases.

PQ 32649

The most recent data available are for the period from 1 April 2010 to 31 March 2018 and relate only relates to convictions for SFOs by offenders under the supervision of the Probation Service at the time they committed the SFO. There have been no people murdered by an offender during their period of supervision following release from prison for the offence of attempted murder. There may be a small number of cases where the offender might have had a previous conviction for attempted murder, but these cases will not have been captured by the SFO Review Procedures.

PQ 32664

The table below shows how many SFOs were committed (convictions) by offenders that were automatically released from prison between 1 April 2015 and 31 March 2018, which are the most recent data available. We will publish conviction data for 2018/19 in October 2020.

Year

Number of offenders convicted of a SFO following an automatic release from prison

1 April 2015 – 31 March 2016

115

1 April 2016 – 31 March 2017

164

1 April 2017 – 31 April 2018

145

  1. Data Sources and Quality. We have drawn these figures from administrative IT systems which, as with some large-scale recording systems, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing
  2. The data do not include a small number of offenders who were (i) sentenced to a hospital order, (ii) died before the conclusion of criminal proceedings (iii) sentenced to an extended determinate sentence or an extended sentence for public protection who may have been released by the Parole Board and (iv) released automatically from prison, who were then recalled to prison and re-released via a decision by the Parole Board or by executive release by the Public Protection Casework Section prior to committing the SFO.

The data do include any offender who was sentenced to imprisonment of under 12 months, who may have been released directly onto post sentence supervision (PSS) rather than a licence.

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