Prisoners' Release

(asked on 24th January 2022) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people have been released from prison in each of the last three years for which records are available; how many of those prisoners were released to (a) a fixed address, (b) HMPPS bridging accommodation and (c) no fixed address; and how many of those released to no fixed address have (i) reoffended and (ii) reoffended and returned to prison.


Answered by
Kit Malthouse Portrait
Kit Malthouse
This question was answered on 2nd February 2022

Data on the number of prisoners who have been released is published as part of the Offender Management Statistics Quarterly publication by the Ministry of Justice.

The total number of prisoners who have been released in each of the last three years is given in the following table:

Year

2018

2019

2020

Number released

69,622

62,771

53,253

Data on the accommodation status of prisoners who have been released is published as part of the Prison and Probation statistics publication by the Ministry of Justice.

The attached table shows the numbers of prisoners who were released to (a) a fixed address, (b) HMPPS bridging accommodation and (c) no fixed address from 2018-2020.

The following table provides the number of individuals released from prison to no fixed address and subsequently (i) reoffended and (ii) reoffended and returned to prison is provided in the table below:

Number of adult reoffenders with no fixed address, 2017/18 to 2019/20, England and Wales1, 2, 3

2017/18

2018/19

2019/20

Total number of adult offenders released from prison

62,936

58,104

53,777

Number of reoffenders with no fixed address3

5,688

5,343

5,195

Number of reoffenders with no fixed address who returned to prison 4

3,252

3,108

2,973

Notes

  1. A proven reoffence is defined as any offence committed in a one-year follow-up period that leads to a court conviction or caution in the one year follow-up period or within a further six-month waiting period to allow the offence to be proven in court.
  2. The annual average figures have been calculated by taking an average of the four preceding three monthly offender cohorts. This may therefore result in a single offender being included in an annual cohort more than once.
  3. No fixed address includes individuals who identify as sleeping rough; and individuals who identify as homeless but have not been identified as sleeping rough. In some cases, it is not recorded whether an individual that is identified as homeless is rough sleeping. These cases have been included in this category.

Figures are based on the first reoffence for which an offender returned to custody. Each offender will therefore only appear once in this category.

To note the numbers released from prison will differ between each of the tables driven mainly by different time periods and different counting rules.

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