Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 22 October 2019 to Question 955 on Prison Sentences, what proportion of all standard determinate custodial sentences handed down to (a) men and (b) women were served in prison.

Sentencing is a matter for the independent judiciary, which takes the full facts of each case into account. In 2018, the mean average proportion of the sentence served in prison by males released from determinate sentences (excluding extended determinate sentences) was 64%, the median proportion was 56%. For females the mean average was 49% and the median was 45%. The overwhelming majority of the releases covered by this data will be from standard determinate sentences but the way the data is recorded does not allow us readily to exclude releases from other types of determinate sentence, such as Detention and Training Orders and sentences for offenders of particular concern imposed under s.236A of the Criminal Justice Act 2003.