Sadiq Khan – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Sadiq Khan on 2014-04-29.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the proven re-offending rate was of (a) those released from prison and (b) those released from prison who self-identified as Muslim in each year since 2010.

Jeremy Wright

The latest proven re-offending rates for those offenders released from prison can be found in tables 1 and 2 below. Table 1 provides overall proven re-offending rates for offenders released from prison and has been taken from the Proven Re-offending Statistics Quarterly Bulletin series. Table 2 provides proven re-offending rates for Muslim offenders released from prison.

A proven re-offence is defined as any offence committed in a one year follow-up period resulting in a court conviction, caution, reprimand or warning in the one year follow-up. Following this one year follow-up, a further six month waiting period is allowed for the offence to be proven in court.

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. A prisoner’s religion is self declared and prisoners are under no obligation to declare.

1. A certain proportion of offenders could not be matched to the Police National Computer (PNC) and are, therefore, not included. Therefore, this number does not represent all proven offenders

1. A certain proportion of offenders could not be matched to the Police National Computer (PNC) and are, therefore, not included. Therefore, this number does not represent all proven offenders.

2. Data on offenders’ religious beliefs are not available for 2010 due to data quality issues following the introduction of a new prison IT system.