16/02/2023
Police Oracle
The main area of concern is that Crown Courts, who deal with all our more serious offences, are going backwards
Today’s publication of the quarterly Criminal Justice Statistics by the Ministry of Justice make it clear just how badly the justice system is struggling. The data, which covers the period up to the end of last September, gives information about activity at every point in the system.
Prosecutions and Convictions
The MoJ tries to put a positive spin on the figures saying that prosecutions and convictions continue to recover following the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, with prosecutions increasing by 5% and convictions by 6% in the year ending September 2022.
While this is true, even with these increases, prosecutions remain 16% and convictions 15% lower than in the year to September 2019. Magistrates’ Courts, which, of course, process the vast majority of cases, are getting back on track, with prosecutions for summary offences up by 8% compared to the previous year.
However, the main area of concern is that Crown Courts, who deal with all our more serious offences, are going backwards: prosecutions for indictable offences were 10% lower than the year ending September 2021. The largest decreases were for fraud, drug offences, and public order offences, down by 27%, 20% and 16% respectively in the latest year. Sexual offence prosecutions were the only indictable offence group to increase – increasing slightly (by 3%) compared to year ending September 2021.
We increasingly see Crown Court trials listed for 2024 or even later, unsurprising with the current backlog standing at 62,766 cases at the end of last September. The human impact of these delays are borne mainly by two groups of people. Many, perhaps most, victims of violent offences will find it hard to get over the trauma of being attacked or abused when their attacker has not been convicted. They must wait anxiously for their case to come to trial, and often have to cope with a trial that does not proceed and is re-scheduled many months further down the line.
Remands in custody
The other group adversely affected are innocent defendants who must wait for years for a chance to clear their name. For the most unlucky of this group, they will be forced to spend the intervening time remanded in custody. The new figures show a further increase in the proportion of defendants remanded into custody at Crown Court. Four out of ten defendants are remanded (up three full percentage points on the preceding year), with increases across all types of offence. While 71% of those remanded in custody are eventually sentenced to immediate custody, almost three out of ten are remanded only to be acquitted or receive a non-custodial sentence.
Longer prison sentences
The statistics also reveal that more people are being sent to prison and sent to prison for longer periods of time.
Custody rates for indictable offences increased from 27% in the year ending September 2012 to 35% in the year ending September 2020. After a fall of 4 percentage points in the year ending September 2021, the custody rate for indictable offences in the latest year is 32%, suggesting a return to pre-pandemic levels. Fraud has seen the largest increase, rising by 6 percentage points from the year ending September 2021, to a custody rate of 32% in the latest year.
Prison sentences continue to get longer. MoJ statisticians talk about the average custodial sentence length, typically shorted to the acronym ACSL. The ACSL overall was 21.7 months in the year ending September 2022, up from 21.2 months in the previous year. The ACSL for indictable offences has risen from 24.0 months in the year ending September 2021 to 24.8 months in the latest year. In particular, ACSL for sexual offences has increased by 3.6 months and drug offences by 4.3 months in the latest year, while average sentence lengths have also increased for violence, criminal damage and arson, and public order offences.
Over the last decade, the ACSL has increased year on year from 17.0 months for indictable offences in year ending September 2012. The statistics show a huge (28%) increase in the number of sentences over 9 years and less than life, up from 1,400 last year to 1,700 in the latest year.