Fewer defendants receiving more punishment

Last week (18 May 2017), the Ministry of Justice published the final Criminal Justice Statistics for the 2016 calendar year.

The headline findings are that although the criminal justice system now deals with fewer people than at any time since 1970, it is more likely to send people to court and punish them more severely.

First time offenders are much more likely to be convicted than cautioned compared to 10 years ago and the custody rate for indictable offences has risen from 24% to 30% since 2010 with the average length of prison sentence rising from 15.2 to 19.4 months over the last decade.

The main findings are summarised below:

The MoJ has also published the helpful infographic below which sets out many of the other main trends:

[Please note that the large blank space at the bottom of the infograhic does not indicate missing data, just a faithful copy of the original.]

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