Prison Sentences
(asked on 17th December 2025) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government how many (1) male, and (2) female, prisoners who were aged 25 years or younger at the time of sentencing were serving a life sentence in custody with a tariff of 15 years or more in each year since 2022, categorised by ethnic group.
The Ministry of Justice routinely publishes data in Offender Management Statistics Quarterly (OMSQ) on the prison population.
Table 1: Number of prisoners serving life sentence who were aged 25 years or younger at sentencing, with a tariff of 25 years or more, broken down by sex, ethnicity and imprisonment status.
| Ethnicity | Status | 30/06/22 | 30/06/23 | 30/06/24 | 20/06/25 |
Male | Asian/Asian British | Unreleased Life | 153 | 177 | 203 | 205 |
Black/Black British | Unreleased Life | 487 | 521 | 578 | 612 | |
Mixed | Unreleased Life | 142 | 155 | 174 | 192 | |
Not stated | Unreleased Life | * | * | 5 | 3 | |
Other ethnic group | Unreleased Life | 24 | 24 | 27 | 28 | |
Unrecorded | Unreleased Life | * | * | 11 | 4 | |
White | Unreleased Life | 742 | 777 | 796 | 814 | |
Female | Asian/Asian British | Unreleased Life | 3 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
Black/Black British | Unreleased Life | * | * | 3 | 3 | |
Mixed | Unreleased Life | * | * | * | * | |
Not Stated | Unreleased Life | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
Other ethnic group | Unreleased Life | 0 | * | * | * | |
Unrecorded | Unreleased Life | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
White | Unreleased Life | 31 | 34 | 37 | 39 |
Table notes:
Tariff length is the time between date of sentencing and tariff expiry date, and does not take into account any time served on remand.
Offenders who are 25 years old or younger at sentencing includes everyone not yet 26 years old at sentencing.
Figures include offenders who received a Whole Life Order.
Disclosure control
An asterisk (*) has been used to suppress values of two or one. This is to prevent disclosure of individual information. Further disclosure control may be completed where this alone is not sufficient.
Source: Prison NOMIS and Public Protection Unit Database
Data sources and quality
The figures in the above tables have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.