18/08/2022
Police Oracle
There has been a significant change in the profile of offences going through the courts over the last two years.
Today’s edition of the quarterly criminal justice statistics for England and Wales (covering the year up to 31 March 2022) show that while business at the courts is increasing, it is still a long way from getting back to normal.
Headlines
1.36 million individuals were dealt with by the criminal justice system in the year ending this March. While this is a big increase of 21% over the previous year, it’s still 12% down from the 1.56 million people that were dealt with by the CJS in the year ending March 2020.
As you would expect, prosecutions (up 27%) and convictions (a 31% increase) have also grown although both remain well below the pre-pandemic peak.
The number of people on remand in prison remains scandalously high. A Freedom of Information request by the charity Fair Trials found that almost 1,800 people have been held on remand for longer than a year and more than 500 of these have been held longer than two years. However, there is some good news in this edition of the criminal justice statistics which shows that the proportion of people remanded in custody in the last year (9% of defendants were remanded in custody by police prior to appearing at court, 4% were remanded in custody at magistrates’ court and 38% at the Crown Court) has broadly returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Detailed findings
There is some interesting detail in the fine print, representing some key changes and new trends in our justice system.
There has been a significant change in the profile of offences going through the courts over the last two years. Prosecutions and convictions for theft are down by over a third in that period, while those for violence (6% increase in prosecution, 9% in convictions) and sexual offences (7% increase in prosecutions, 19% in convictions) have risen.
In the latest year there was a 16% increase in police recorded crime (including fraud), and a 13% decrease in the number of offences charged by the police. This represents a continuation of trends prior to the pandemic and reflects the fact that fraud (particularly of the online variety) is the fastest growing category of crime and the one that the police are least able to deal with.
Out of court disposals
There were 208,000 Out of court disposals (OOCDs) issued in the year ending March 2022, a 5% decrease compared to the previous year and a 2% decrease compared to pre-pandemic levels.
The decrease in OOCDs in the latest year was largely driven by a fall in Cannabis / khat warnings which, despite being the smallest proportion of OOCDs (4%), more than halved from 17,100 to 8,200, compared to year ending March 2021.
Community resolutions, the largest proportion of OOCDs (66%), have increased every year since 2018. In 2022, community resolutions were the only OOCD to increase – increasing 3% compared to year ending March 2021 and increasing 33% compared to year ending March 2018.
Longer sentences
The average custodial sentence length (ACSL) for all indictable offences (those serious enough to be heard in the Crown Court) reached 25.7 months in the latest year, up by over one half from 16.8 months in 2012.
The latest year’s increase in ACSL for indictable offences highlights the sustained rising trend since 2012, recovering from the decline seen in the previous year, to 3.7 months above levels shown immediately prior to the pandemic (22.0 months). Average custodial sentence lengths for sexual offences (including rape) increased by 11.2 months compared to year ending March 2021 and by 4.4 months from the year ending March 2020.
The custody rate for indictable offences has risen from 26% in the year ending March 2012 to 32% in the latest year, a slight decrease from levels seen in the last two years. The largest increase was seen in fraud offences which rose by 5 percentage points from the year ending March 2020 to a custody rate of 31%. Drug offences also increased by 4 percentage points since 2020 to 28% in the latest year.
Longer sentences are, of course, one of the main reasons that our prison population is predicted to grow by over 10,000 over next three years.