Analysis of the risk of suicide and drug-related deaths among prisoners, including the number of deaths, standarised mortality ratios and age-standardised rates, England and Wales, 2008 to 2019.

The HMIP (His Majesty's Inspectorate of Prisons) Prisoner Surveys (also formerly known as Detainee Surveys) are part of the Inspectorate's duties to inspect prisons. Surveys of prisoners have been carried out systematically since 2000 at institutions being inspected, to gain important insight into detainees' experiences of offender management whilst in custody.

Prisoners are issued with the survey questionnaire to return to the HMIP team, which processes the data to inform inspections of individual institutions and the HMIP annual reports.

The survey is grouped into topics/themes of questions with response categories, as well as providing space for prisoners to add additional comments (such text comments are not included in these datasets).

The specific objectives of the HMIP Prisoner Survey series are as follows:

• to produce data that are comparable as possible over time and between custodial institutions;
• to provide data for a large and representative sample of adult prisoners in England and Wales. So far, over 20 years' worth of data has been collected. The survey conducted in 2020/21 was subject to HMIP COVID-19 restrictions.

Further information can be found on the HMIP Prisoner Survey webpage.

End User Licence and Special Licence versions

Two versions of the HMIP Prisoner Survey are held at UKDS: an End User Licence (EUL) version (SN 9161) that is subject to registration and standard access conditions, and a more detailed Special Licence (SL) version (SN 9068), which has additional access restrictions. The document 'end_user_licence_group_changes', available with the EUL version, SN 9161, details the differences between the two versions. Users should obtain the EUL version first to see whether it is suitable for their needs before considering making an application for access to the SL version.

For the second edition (October 2024), data and documentation for 2023/24 were added to the study.

The dataset has been created from registers of prisoners in Newgate Prison charged with indictable offences, most for trial at the Old Bailey. The information given includes the name of the prisoner, offences charged and outcomes, with physical descriptions and biographical details in many cases. In the 19th century, British prisons recorded ever-increasing amounts of physical, biometric and biographical information about prisoners. However, it is very unusual for 18th-century records to contain this type of detail, and these registers are consequently a rare and rich source. (Indeed, they surpass many 19th-century prison records because they are not restricted to convicted prisoners.) Their usefulness is further enhanced by information about the outcomes of cases.

Following the FCA's Policy Statement on the changes to the responsible lending rules, it has published further data on the mortgage prisoner population. The FCA's Mortgage Market Study estimated that around 140,000 borrowers were unable to switch to a better deal even though they were up-to-date with their payments. To help fix this it changed its rules late last year to allow lenders to assess affordability based on a borrower’s track record of making mortgage payments.

The charts show analysis of the entire dataset which includes all borrowers in closed mortgage books and those who have mortgages owned by unregulated firms regardless of their eligibility to switch because of our new rules. The FCA conducted a data gathering exercise which collected details on all mortgage accounts owned by unregulated firms. This data was combined with details of mortgage accounts held in closed books of regulated firms.

Slice created from parent data set: Full Virginia Girls' Reformatory Admissions Database 1910-1938

Data set of 2,370 individual female reformatory inmates admitted to the Virginia Home and Industrial School for Girls at Bon Air and the Industrial Home School for Colored Girls at Peake’s Turnout between 1910 and 1938. Created out of the unpublished and archived admissions books of these institutions. Due to Virginia’s 75-year privacy restriction, I stopped collecting at December 1938 for each institution. Data from the Home at Bon Air runs 1910 to 1938; from the Home at Peake’s Turnout from 1915 to 1938. Each reformatory kept separate books, which were archived into separate collections. There was enough similarity between the two books to transcribe the data into one large data set.

Reformatory administrators hand wrote basic administrative information about each girl into bound books. For incoming delinquent girls, they recorded: student number, name, birthdate or age at admittance, date of admittance, and committing jurisdiction (by county or city jurisdiction.) The books also recorded the individual’s parole history, including first parole (and up to her third parole on an individual’s performance) and any return dates; administrators recorded the destination of the first parole, but this was inconsistently recorded. The books note when and to whom inmates were married, usually after their official dismissal. Because transferring an inmate officially removed them from the responsibility of the reformatory, administrators recorded transfer information, including where they went and when. Lastly, the books recorded the official dismissal date and reason. Bon Air’s books were more consistent with recording dismissals and neither institution used consistent definitions of “transfer” versus “dismissal.”

I manually transcribed these books verbatim into a database. From this core data, I added categories of information to aid my analysis. These include: race, gender, and reformatory; calculations of either age or birthdate (Peake’s recorded birthdates, Bon Air only ages); parole year taken from the first parole date; parole type determined by me based on the parole destination, if recorded. To help me analyze transfer and dismissal information, I determined the “type” and “category” of each transfer or dismissal and added new categories. These allowed me to “rollup” the varieties of recorded data into fewer descriptive types and categories. Because administrators recorded only the institution name or location when girls were transferred and dismissed elsewhere, this allowed me to organize this info into 18 “types”: asylum, colony, court, death, department of public welfare, escape, family, honorable discharge, illegal commitment, maternity, orphanage, other, penal, private, reorganization (only used for Bon Air in 1914), sanitorium/hospital, venereal disease, and wages. These 18 “types” were then further distilled into 9 “categories” to capture the broadest possible categorization of the reasons why girls were transferred or dismissed: administrative, death, escape, mental, penal, physical, private, unknown, and work.

I have removed the names of the individual inmates upon publication. Researchers interested in using this data in their own work can contact me at erin@erinbush.org to request the versions that include full name fields. The Data Dictionary is also available upon request.

The contents of these data sets, as government records, I believe fall under fair use.

Full Collection

• Full Virginia Girls' Reformatory Admissions Database 1910-1938: https://zenodo.org/records/3872019
• Full Virginia Girls' Reformatory Transfer and Dismissal Data 1910-1938: https://zenodo.org/records/3872110
• Full Virginia Girls' Reformatory Parole Data 1910-1938: https://zenodo.org/records/3872100

The dataset has been created from The National Archives' summary descriptions for more than 1000 pardoning reports and letters which were written by judges about individuals convicted at the Old Bailey between 1784 and 1827. The information given typically includes the name of the convict, the date of the trial and the sentence passed, the grounds cited in favour of clemency, and the recommendation (if any) made by the judge.Offenders who had been convicted and sentenced by the courts were permitted to petition the crown for the reduction or revocation of their sentence. The Home Office usually forwarded these petitions to the trial judge (or the Recorder of London), asking for a report and recommendation on the case. In most instances the Home Office followed the recommendation made by the judge. These records often provide valuable information about prisoners and the actual outcomes of their cases after sentencing.

The Criminal Research: Communities of Practice research project involved the creation of learning spaces that were both creatively stimulating and methodologically replicable in international prison environments with inmate practitioners. These programmes, one based on the workshop method, and the other based on the atelier method providing prisoners with a series of ‘Masterclasses’, culminated in three separate anthologies of prisoner work, encouraging prisoner participation in an ongoing community of literary practice.This item contains the first Speak Out! Anthology from the project, published in Spring 2018.Used with permission.The work is under copyright and may not be used without permission. Use of this repository acknowledges cooperation with its policies and relevant copyright law.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The Offending, Crime and Justice Survey (OCJS) (also sometimes known as the Crime and Justice Survey), was the first national longitudinal, self-report offending survey for England and Wales. The series began in 2003, the initial survey representing the first wave in a planned four-year rotating panel study, and ended with the 2006 wave. A longitudinal dataset based on the four years of the study was released in 2009 (held at the Archive under SN 6345).

The OCJS was commissioned by the Home Office, with the overall objective of providing a solid base for measuring the prevalence of offending and drug use in the general population of England and Wales. The survey was developed in response to a significant gap in data on offending in the general population, as opposed to particular groups such as convicted offenders. A specific aim of the series was to monitor trends in offending among young people.

The OCJS series was designed as a 'rotating panel' which means that in each subsequent year, part of the previous year's sample was re-interviewed, and was augmented by a further 'fresh' sample to ensure a cross-sectional representative sample of young people. The aim of this design was to fulfil two objectives: firstly, to provide a solid cross-sectional base from which to monitor year-on-year measures of offending, drug use, and contact with the CJS over the four-year tracking period (2003-2006); and secondly, to provide longitudinal insight into individual behaviour and attitudinal changes over time, and to enable the Home Office to identify temporal links between and within the key survey measures.

The OCJS was managed by a team of researchers in the Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate. The Home Office commissioned BMRB Social Research and the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) to conduct the surveys jointly. Both organisations were involved in developing the surveys and, at each wave, the fieldwork was split between the two agencies.

OCJS 2003:
The OCJS 2003 was the first survey in the series, and was conducted between January and July 2003, with a sample of around 12,000 people aged 10-65 years, living in private households in England and Wales. The survey collected information on the extent and nature of offending behaviour, drug and alcohol use, attitudes to and contact with the criminal justice system and experiences of victimisation. Respondents were asked about offending behaviour in their lifetime, and during the last 12 months.

The main aims of the OCJS 2003 were to provide:

• a measure of the number of offenders in the general household population in England and Wales and the offences they commit, including those who will not have been processed by the criminal justice system
• an estimate of the proportion of offenders and offences that come to the attention of criminal justice agencies
• an estimate of the proportion of offenders who are young people and the proportion of crime they commit
• information on the nature of offences committed, and in particular, offender motivations
• information on patterns of drug use and links to offending
• data to identify risk factors associated with the onset and continuation of offending and drug use, and factors associated with desistance

For the third edition (August 2008), an updated version of the main file has been deposited. Derived variables relating to the number of times that respondents have offended in the past year have been revised due to an improvement in the method of imputing values for those who refused to answer the count of offending questions. New users should also note that the domestic violence data were removed at an earlier edition due to concerns over consistency.

Main Topics:

The basic OCJS questionnaire comprises modules on the following topics:

• household grid (conducted using Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI))
• socio-demographic characteristics (CAPI)
• neighbourhood (CAPI)
• attitudes to the criminal justice system (CAPI)
• contact with criminal justice system (part 1) (CAPI)
• victimisation (CAPI)
• antisocial behaviour (conducted using Audio Computer Assisted Self-Interviewing (ACASI))
• white collar/'hi-tech' crime (ACASI)
• offending - count/follow-up (ACASI)
• offending - nature (conducted using Computer Assisted Self-Interviewing (CASI))
• contact with criminal justice system (part 2) (CASI)
• domestic violence (CASI)
• drinking (CASI)
• drug use (CASI)
• health, lifestyle and risk factors (CASI)
• reactions to the survey and recontact (CASI)

In addition to questionnaire data, the dataset also includes derived socio-economic and geo-demographic...

The Criminal Research: Communities of Practice research project involved the creation of learning spaces that were both creatively stimulating and methodologically replicable in international prison environments with inmate practitioners. These programmes, one based on the workshop method, and the other based on the atelier method providing prisoners with a series of ‘Masterclasses’, culminated in three separate anthologies of prisoner work, encouraging prisoner participation in an ongoing community of literary practice.This item contains the second Speak Out! Anthology from the project, produced in Spring 2019. Used with permission.The work is under copyright and may not be used without permission. Use of this repository acknowledges cooperation with its policies and relevant copyright law.