Knives: Sentencing
(asked on 11th March 2019) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the average prison sentence was for (a) possession of a blade or point and (b) threatening with a blade or point in each of the last three years.
The information requested can be seen in the table below.
Average immediate custody length (in months)1,2 for offences involving possession of, or threatening with, an article with a blade or point resulting in an immediate custodial sentence by offence type, in England and Wales3, annually from 2014 |
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Year | Offence type | |||||||||||
Possession | Threatening | |||||||||||
2014 | 6.5 | 11.5 | ||||||||||
2015 | 6.3 | 10.8 | ||||||||||
2016 | 6.7 | 11.4 | ||||||||||
2017 | 6.6 | 10.5 | ||||||||||
2018 | 7.4 | 12.8 | ||||||||||
Source: Ministry of Justice extract of the Police National Computer | ||||||||||||
Notes: | ||||||||||||
1 Excludes life sentences and where sentence length is unknown. |
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2 A month has been assumed to be 30 days. |
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3 England and Wales includes all 43 police force areas and the British Transport Police. |
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As you will see from the table, knife offences both possession and threatening, receive longer sentences now than they did in the past.