These ad hoc statistics provide an update on the characteristics of the cohort of prolific offenders, 2000-2021.

The reports present key statistics on activity in the criminal justice system for England and Wales. It provides information for the latest year (2018) with accompanying commentary, analysis and presentation of longer term trends.

An interactive Sankey diagram (a type of flow diagram, in which the width of the arrows is shown proportionally to the number each represents) presenting information on offending histories accompanies this bulletin.

https://moj-analytical-services.github.io/criminal_history_sankey/index.html" class="govuk-link">Offending histories

Pre-release access

The bulletin is produced and handled by the ministry’s analytical professionals and production staff. Pre-release access of up to 24 hours is granted to the following persons:

Ministry of Justice

Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice; Minister of State for Prisons and Probation; Parliamentary Under Secretary of State - Courts and Legal Aid; Parliamentary Under Secretary of State and Minister for Victims, Youth and Family Justice; Lords spokesperson – Ministry of Justice; Permanent Secretary; Principal Private Secretary; Deputy Principal Private Secretary; Private Secretary x5; Deputy Private Secretary; Assistant Private Secretary x3; 2 Special Advisers; 2 Press Officers; Director General, Policy, Communications & Analysis Group; Director, Data & Analytical Services Directorate; Chief Statistician; Director, Family and Criminal Justice Policy; Deputy Director, Bail, Sentencing and Release Policy; Section Head, Criminal Court Policy; Director, Offender and Youth Justice Policy; Section Head, Custodial Sentencing Policy; Head of Courts and Sentencing, Youth Justice Policy; Deputy Director - Crime; Crime Service Manager (Case Progression) - Courts and Tribunals Development; Head of Operational Performance; Deputy Director, Legal Operations - Courts & Tribunals Development Directorate; Policy Adviser x5; Statistician; Data Analyst x2.

Home Office

Home Secretary; Private Secretary to the Home Secretary; Deputy Principal Private Secretary to the Home Secretary; Assistant Private Secretary to the HO Permanent Secretary; Permanent Secretary, Home Office; Minister of State for Policing and the Fire Service; Assistant Private Secretary Minister of State for Policing and the Fire Service; Director of Crime, Home Office; Head of Crime and Policing Statistics, Home Office; Statistician - Recorded crime statistics.

The Judiciary

Lord Chief Justice; Head of the Criminal Justice Team.

Cabinet Office

Principal Analyst, Justice.

Department for Education (pre-release access limited to supplementary paper on Prolific Offenders):

Secretary of State for Education (and Private Secretary); Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Children and Families (and Private Secretary); Minister of State for School Standards (and Private Secretary); Special Advisers; Deputy Director, Data Group and Deputy Head of Profession for Statistics; Policy Official x9; Analyst x8; Press Officer x2.

Introduction

The Justice Data Lab has been launched as a pilot for one year from April 2013. During this year, a small team from Analytical Services within the Ministry of Justice will support organisations that provide offender services by allowing them easy access to aggregate re-offending data, specific to the group of people they have worked with. This will support organisations in understanding their effectiveness at reducing re-offending.

The service model involves organisations sending the Justice Data Lab team details of the offenders they have worked with along with information about the specific intervention they have delivered. The Data Lab team then matches these offenders to MoJ’s central datasets and returns the re-offending rate of this particular cohort, alongside that of a control group of offenders with very similar characteristics in order to better identify the impact of the organisation’s work.

There are two publication types:

• A summary of the findings of the Justice Data Lab pilot to date (2 April to 31 September 2013).

• Tailored reports about the re-offending outcomes of services or interventions delivered by each of the organisations who have requested information through the Justice Data Lab pilot. Each report is an Official Statistic and will show the results of the re-offending analysis for the particular service or intervention delivered by the organisation in question.

Main findings to date

This publication reports on the Justice Data Lab requests received in the six months between the launch of the Justice Data Lab on the 2nd April 2013, and 31st September 2013. During this period there were 52 requests for re-offending information completed through the Justice Data Lab. Of these requests; 7 requests have been fully answered. 7 requests could not be answered, as the minimum criteria for a Data Lab analysis had not been met. The remaining requests will be processed in due course.

Two organisations delivered programmes which led to a statistically significant reduction in re-offending. These organisations and their programmes are:

• Brighton & Hove City Council Preventing Offender Accommodation Loss (POAL) Project
• Blue Sky who offer ex-offenders short term, full-time employment contracts.

Four inconclusive results which looked at programmes delivered by Safe Ground, The Prison Fellowship, The Koestler Trust and HMP Swansea Community Chaplaincy Project. Reasons for an inconclusive result include; the sample of individuals provided by the organisation was too small to detect a statistically significant change in behaviour; or that the service or programme genuinely does not affect re-offending behaviour. However, it is very difficult to differentiate between these reasons in the analysis, so the organisations are recommended to submit larger samples of data when it becomes available.

One organisation, Shelter, who delivered a housing programme which led to a statistically significant increase in re-offending. We have worked with Shelter to understand more about the programme, and why this result might have been observed. Further investigation has revealed that the Shelter housing programme delivered in prisons involves housing advisors offering a short advice sessions to prisoners, with further sessions arranged as needed. Additionally, the service is likely to attract prolific offenders who have multiple complex needs, including access to housing. It can be very challenging to model the effect of services received by persons with multiple complex needs, so the negative result will also reflect the fact that the group that Shelter worked with will typically be much harder to help.

The bulletin is produced and handled by the Ministry’s analytical professionals and production staff. Pre-release access of up to 24 hours is granted to the following persons: Ministry of Justice: Secretary of State, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Permanent Secretary, Policy Advisers for reducing re-offending, Policy Advisors for the Transforming Rehabilitation Programme, and relevant Press Officers and Special Advisers.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) Data First Synthetic Data Project aims to improve engagement with Data First datasets by making synthetic versions of content available to enable more rapid development of research proposals and to thereby enhance the potential for linked administrative data to improve understanding and outcomes across justice systems. The project has led the development of two components: a dataset generation platform and an initial release of lo-fidelity, synthetic data tables.