David Ruffley – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice
The below Parliamentary question was asked by David Ruffley on 2014-06-04.
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many persistent young offenders were registered in (a) Bury St Edmunds, (b) Suffolk and (c) England and Wales in each of the last five years; and how many and what proportion of total offences were attributable to such offenders in that period.
Jeremy Wright
The prevention of reoffending by young people is a key priority for this Government. Overall crime and proven offending by young people is down, and fewer young people are entering the criminal justice system. But for those young people that are committing crimes it’s right that the most serious or persistent are sentenced to custody, and those that commit violent offences face tough sentences.
It is unacceptable however that nearly three-quarters of young offenders who leave custody go on to reoffend – this needs to change. That’s why we are doubling the amount of education we give those in Young Offenders Institutions and why we are reforming the youth estate with the introduction of Secure Colleges. These new establishments will tackle the root cause of offending by giving people the skills and self-discipline to gain employment and training upon release and turn their lives around. We announced on 8 June the name of the company selected to design and build the pathfinder.
Table 1 (attached) shows the number of young offenders by their previous criminal history for young offenders cautioned or sentenced (a) by Suffolk Police Force Area; and (b) across England and Wales. There is no national definition of a persistent offender, with Local Criminal Justice Boards setting criteria locally to identify persistent offenders based on their volume of crime and impact on their local community. The table below therefore shows offenders with one or more previous cautions or sentencing occasions. The Police National Computer (PNC) does not break down information below police force area; it is not therefore possible to provide data specific only to Bury St Edmunds. Due to variations in local definitions of “persistent”, it is not possible to determine the proportion of overall offences committed by “persistent” offenders in any of the geographical areas specified.
These figures are based on counting the number of separate occasions on which offenders were cautioned or sentenced in each year and some offenders will therefore be represented several times in the figures. They are based only on those offences recorded on the PNC by an English or Welsh police force, including the British Transport Police. The figures therefore exclude a range of low-level (non-recordable) summary offences committed by these offenders e.g. TV licence evasion and speeding as these are not recorded on the PNC. As with any large scale recording system the PNC is subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.
