Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of comparative statistics in other European states for (1) custodial sentences per head of population, and (2) reoffending rates for individuals who have served either (a) custodial or (b) community sentences.

We are keen to learn from innovative justice practice in other countries and are currently reviewing international evidence of what works.

We contribute towards the Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics and the International Centre for Prison Studies, which provide a comparison of custodial sentences per head of population.

In the case of reoffending, few comparisons have been published because of the limited number of countries which regularly collect and analyse such data and the different methods which are used to calculate these rates. The 2010 “Compendium of reoffending statistics and analysis” compares reoffending rates for England and Wales, Scotland and the Netherlands. It concluded that most of the difference in reoffending rates between countries identified was due to the different measurement techniques, rather than any real difference in the level of reoffending between particular groups of offenders.