Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many (a) referrals, (b) prosecutions and (c) successful prosecutions relating to crimes allegedly committed by prisoners have taken place in each of the last six years; and if he will make a statement.

The Ministry of Justice is not able to provide data on (a) referrals, (b) prosecutions and (c) successful prosecutions relating to crimes allegedly committed by prisoners as this information is not held centrally on the court proceedings database.

We are not able to identify in our data whether individual offenders are prisoners or not, nor whether offences have taken place in prisons. I have commissioned work on how this this data can be captured.