Reconviction rates by offenders' gender and age
This dataset includes the reconviction rate and the average number of reconvictions per offender for local authorities and at the national level. These are published annually in the Reconviction Rates in Scotland National Statistics Bulletin
Reconvictions are calculated for a cohort of offenders that have either been released from custody or given a non-custodial sentence in Scottish court in each financial year.
The reconviction rate is the percentage of offenders that were reconvicted in a Scottish court within a year of being released from custody or given a non-custodial sentence.
The average number of reconvictions is a measure of, on average, how many times offenders are reconvicted in a Scottish court within a year of being released from a custodial sentence or given a non-custodial sentence. Note that as these are averages for the cohort, there would be variation within the cohort; as some offenders are not reconvicted, but others may be reconvicted several times.
The figures are based on data held on the Scottish Offenders Index (SOI) which is derived from the Criminal History System at the Scottish Police Authority. The SOI covers all convictions where the main offence was a crime in Groups 1-5 of the Scottish Governments classification of crimes and offences; or some crimes and offences in Group 6, including common assault, breach of the peace, racially aggravated harassment or conduct, miscellaneous firearms offences and social security offences.
See here for counting rules.
The privacy notice is available on the Scottish Government's Justice Statistics webpage at the following link
See the link here for more information about data quality.
The figures have been derived from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing. During the production of these figures we have put in place processes to ensure that the data are fit for purpose.
Values are missing for certain year, age, and gender combinations in some local authorities because there were no offenders with those particular characteristics.
Reconvictions are calculated for local authorities, based on the court where offenders’ index convictions were given. The areas that courts cover do not always match local authority boundaries and some courts may cover more than one local authority. Where we cannot distinguish between local authorities, the same reconviction rate has been entered for the local authorities, so for example Edinburgh and Midlothian have the same reconviction rate.
We cannot distinguish Edinburgh and Midlothian; East Ayrshire, North Ayrshire, and South Ayrshire; East Renfrewshire and Renfrewshire; North Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire; and East Dunbartonshire and West Dunbartonshire.
We have started to collect the postcode of offenders so we can calculate reconviction rates for each local authority based on the residence of offenders. These were published as experimental statistics for the first time in the 2015-16 Offender cohort bulletin, but as the data isn’t of sufficient quality yet, we recommend using the court based estimates for local authority reconviction rates. When the data quality improves over the next few years, these will be published on statistics.gov.scot.
Additional datasets are published alongside the Reconviction Rates in Scotland National Statistics Bulletins under the “supporting documents” page for each publication that provide further breakdowns at local authority level, for example, crime type and disposal.
Recidivism is where someone has received some form of criminal justice sanction (such as a community sentence or a fine) and goes on to commit another offence. Therefore determining recidivism is important as it illustrates the effectiveness of the criminal justice system on the punishment and rehabilitation of offenders. Reconviction rates are a proxy measure for recidivism, as not all offences recorded by the police will necessarily result in a conviction in court.
There is a time lag because a follow-up period is required to calculate reconvictions. The reconviction rates in Scotland were reported with a two year follow-up period. From the 2009-10 onwards, the focus has been mainly on a follow-up period of one year rather than two years as, in general, the one year rate tracks the two year rate and has the benefit of being more timely.
The reconviction rates are revised each year as data to take into account any changes to the data on the Criminal History System. See the link here for more information about revisions.
This slice of multidimensional data is not a Linked Data resource in the database: it's a virtual resource (i.e. you can't query it by SPARQL). But does have a permanent unique URL which can be bookmarked.