Prisoners' Release
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what proportion of a) men and b) women were released from prison after serving less than i) 50% ii) 33% and iii) 25% of their prison sentence in jail in each of the last 3 years.
Answered by Ministry of Justice
This Government inherited prisons days from collapse. We had no choice but to take decisive action to stop our prisons overflowing and keep the public safe. Without the changes this Government made, courts would have had to halt trials and the police cancel arrests, undermining public safety and leading to a disastrous impact on public confidence in the Criminal Justice System.
As is set out in existing legislation, most offenders, unless the court judges them to be dangerous, will receive a standard determinate sentence. This means they must be released automatically at a fixed release point, with the remainder of the sentence to be served on licence in the community. Prisoners can, however, serve a complex mix of concurrent and consecutive sentences, and data is not readily available on the proportion of each of their individual sentences that a prisoner has served across their time in custody. However, we regularly publish data on releases from prison in the quarterly Offender Management Statistics, which includes data on average time served for determinate sentences. We have also published data on releases under SDS40 and, before that up until September 2024, End of Custody Supervised Licence.
Offender management statistics quarterly - GOV.UK
Standard Determinate Sentence (SDS40) release data - GOV.UK
End of Custody Supervised Licence (ECSL) detailed data - GOV.UK
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