Offenders: Mental Health
Justice
Written answers and statements, 20 October 2009
Alison Seabeck (Plymouth, Devonport, Labour)
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what estimate his Department has made of the number of offenders subject to a custodial sentence who have previously been given a conditional discharge; and what proportion of those offenders have been diagnosed with mental health problems.
Claire Ward (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Ministry of Justice; Watford, Labour)
Out of 94,600 sentences of immediate custody in England and Wales in 2007, the latest year for which figure are available, 52,200 offenders (55 per cent.) had on at least one previous sentencing occasion received a conditional discharge. Information about the mental health of these offenders is not available.
These figures have been drawn from the police's administrative IT system, the police national computer (PNC), which, as with any large scale recording system, is subject to possible errors with data entry and processing. The figures are provisional and subject to change as more information is recorded by the police.
The figures represent a further breakdown of the criminal history statistics published in chapter 6 of "Sentencing Statistics 2007" which can be found at: