– Scottish Parliament written question – answered at on 19 January 2009.
Question S3W-19241
To ask the Scottish Executive what proportion of sex offenders who completed a custodial sentence on 31 March 2008 and had been assessed during their sentence as suitable for participation in the Sex Offender Treatment Programme took part in the programme during their custodial sentence.
I have asked Mike Ewart, Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service to respond. His response is as follows:
Whilst the question seeks information for a specific date, for the purpose of answering this question we have presumed the interest was for statistics relating to the year ending 31 March 2008.
As reported in our answer to question S3W-16676 on 24 October 2008, there was a total of 150 sex offenders liberated from Scottish prisons in 2007-08.
Of these 70 (49%) were deemed as suitable for participation on Sex Offender Treatment Programmes (SOTPs), 59 (39%) completed SOTPs before release from prison whilst the remaining 11 (7%) either dropped out of the programmes after starting, refused a place on the programmes when offered or had insufficient time left in their sentence to complete the programme before liberation when a place became available.
The remaining 80 (51%) who were not assessed as suitable for SOTPs either refused assessment for SOTPs, indicated they would not participate on the programmes or had insufficient time in their sentence to complete the programme before liberation.
These figures are consistent with expected trends for SOTP assessment, drop-out rates and delivery.
All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/Apps2/Business/PQA/Default.aspx.
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