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Data sources
1. The information presented in this bulletin is based on data held in the Scottish Offenders Index (SOI). This database, which is in turn derived from information held on the police operational computer at the Scottish Criminal Record Office (SCRO), currently contains a record for each set of court proceedings which resulted in conviction and sentence being imposed in the period 1989 to 1999. All convictions for SCRO-recordable offences are covered; for the purposes of this bulletin this comprises all convictions for crimes in Groups 1-5 of the Scottish Executive Justice Department’s classification of crimes and offences and convictions for the common law offences of simple assault and breach of the peace.
2. A summary profile of the offenders and convictions covered in the SOI is given in Table A1 and Table A2.
Counting rules and data definitions
3. If more than one set of court proceedings against an offender is disposed of on the same day, then each occasion will be counted as a separate conviction record in the SOI.
4. Generally only the initial court sentence is included in the statistics on convictions, so that, for example, a person fined is regarded as fined even if he or she subsequently goes to prison in default of payment. Similarly, the offenders released from prison who are included in the analysis in this bulletin will only include those directly sentenced to prison, i.e. this will exclude persons released after imprisonment for fine default. Also, no account is taken of the outcome of appeals, or of interim decisions such as deferral of sentence.
5. Where a person is convicted for more than one charge, then it is the main offence which is recorded in the SOI. The main offence is taken to be the charge receiving the severest penalty. If more than one charge receives the same (or a combined) penalty, then the main offence is the one judged by the police (who provide the information) to be the most serious. Additional information is also available, in analysis data sets separate to the SOI, of court disposals in relation to individual offences. These analysis data sets were created only relatively recently, and as the information on the source SCRO database is constantly updated, they differ marginally from the coverage of the SOI, eg to reflect the outcome of appeals. However, these differences are not judged to be significant for the purposes of the statistical analysis presented in this bulletin.
6. The police record very detailed information on statutory offences but this does not always correspond exactly to the SEJD classification of crimes and offences. The most important example in numerical terms is an offence under Section 41(1)(a) of the Police (Scotland) Act 1967. This offence relates to "any person who assaults, resists, obstructs, molests or hinders a constable..". The SEJD classification divides this into 3 categories - resisting arrest, serious assault and simple assault, but this distinction is not made by the courts. The majority of such cases are thought to have been classed as simple assault, and all the offences under this subsection have been so classified from 1988 onwards. Only a minimal number of cases are affected by other instances of this type of problem.
7. The Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1995 led to a change in the way in which offending while on bail is treated in the statistics on convictions. Offenders convicted of offending while subject to a bail order issued prior to 1 April 1996 will, if the main result related to the bail re-offending offence, have this classified as the main offence in the conviction record in the SOI. Where the bail order was issued after 1 April 1996, the main offence will be the offence committed while on bail as the aggravation applies to that offence and is not now separately categorised. The effect of the 1995 legislation was therefore to decrease the number of persons with a main offence classified as "bail re-offending" category, with consequent rises in the figures for other categories.
8. In the analysis of reconvictions presented in this bulletin, where an offender was sentenced for a court or bail-related offence and other offences on the same day, then the most serious of latter is taken as being the main offence (even where the court or bail offence had attracted the heaviest penalty).
9. In order to analyse reconvictions, a decision has to be made as to which of an individual's convictions in a series is to be taken as a reference point, or index conviction. That is, the conviction before which all convictions are counted as previous convictions, and after which are counted as reconvictions.
10. In this bulletin, the rule for choosing the index conviction is the first occasion in 1995 on which an individual was given a non-custodial sentence, or the first date at which an individual was estimated to have been released from prison from a previous custodial sentence, whichever occurred first. This is defined to be the offender’s index conviction. The crime and disposal involved in this index conviction are referred to throughout this bulletin as the index crime and index disposal respectively. The analysis then considers the proportion of these individuals who are reconvicted within 1, 2, … years from the date of sentence or the estimated prison release date, ie from the relevant date of the index conviction. Convictions for a court or bail related offence, are not considered as index convictions. If the first conviction in 1995 for a particular offender was for such an offence, their next non-court related conviction was taken instead. Where an individual had no further convictions in 1995 for non-court related crimes they are not included in the data set.
11. Where there is a choice of more than one index conviction for an individual, i.e. where they received more than one sentence disposal on the same day, then the one selected is by reference to a) the most severe form of sentence and then b) the most serious main offence.
12. Crimes and offences and sentence type have been grouped in this bulletin as follows.
| Crime category |
Crimes and offences included |
|
Violent crime | Murder, culpable homicide, attempted murder, serious assault, handling offensive weapons, robbery, simple assault, other violence |
|
Sexual crime | Rape, attempted rape, indecent assault, lewd and libidinous practices, other indecency, breach of a sex offender order. Excludes prostitution offences |
| Dishonesty |
Housebreaking, theft by opening lockfast places, theft of motor vehicle, other theft, fraud, other dishonesty |
|
Criminal damage | Fire-raising, vandalism. |
| Drug offences | Illegal importation, supply or possession of drugs, other drug offences |
|
Breach of the peace | Breach of the peace |
| Other crime | Crimes against public justice, prostitution offences, other crimes (not elsewhere specified) |
| Serious violent crime | As per violent crime, but including only those convictions which took place in the High Court or a sheriff solemn court. |
| Serious crime | All convictions which took place in the High Court or in a sheriff solemn court, and any other convictions for serious assault, robbery, possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life etc, abduction, attempted rape and indecent assault. |
| Sentence category | Sentences included |
| Custody |
Custodial sentence to prison, young offender’s institution or child detention, including life and indeterminate sentences |
| Community Service Orders |
Community service order (CSO), supervised attendance order |
| Probation |
Probation (with or without CSO or RLO), restriction of liberty order (RLO) |
| Monetary | Fine, compensation order, caution |
| Other | Absolute discharge, remit to children’s hearing, admonishment, hospital order, guardianship order, finding of insanity, hospital order & restricted order, supervision and treatment order, drug treatment and testing order and disposals not elsewhere specified. |
13. The age of each person relates to their age at the time that sentence was passed. This also applies to offenders discharged from a custodial sentence, ie their age at the date of sentence rather than estimated release date is taken.
14. Information on actual dates of release for prisoners is not currently available for matching with the conviction data held on the Scottish Offenders Index.. For the purposes of the analysis in this bulletin, the date of release for offenders given a custodial sentence has therefore been estimated from their date of sentence, the length of sentence imposed, assumptions about time spent on remand and release on parole, and information about whether the offender had been granted bail. The release date estimated by this approach will inevitably not always tie in with the (unknown) actual release date, for example because the offender may be serving other custodial sentences or because the sentence may have been backdated. However, this is not judged to be significant for the current analysis. purposes. The main exception to this relates to offenders discharged from very long determinate (over 12 years) custodial or life sentences - see note 18 below.
Limitations of reconviction analysis
15. While virtually all convictions between 1989 and 1999 for all crimes, simple assault and breach of the peace are covered by the SOI, other types of conviction are not. These include:
16. All but the most serious of offences alleged to have been committed by children under the age of 16 are generally dealt with by the children’s hearings system. The SOI does not hold information on offenders’ juvenile offending history.
17. Since the SOI does not hold information on actual dates of offences were committed, some reconvictions will be for crimes or offences committed prior to the date of the index conviction. These "pseudo reconvictions" will therefore inflate the apparent reconviction rate, particularly in cases where an offender pleads not guilty.
18. It is not possible using the method described at note 14 above to identify from the data those offenders released in 1995 from serving life sentences or very lengthy (over 12 years) determinate sentences. This category of offender will therefore not have been available for possible selection for the set of index convictions in 1995. However, the number of offenders involved is relatively small (only around 50 offenders receive such sentences each year) and so will not affect the analysis presented in this bulletin significantly. Separate research evidence (Life Sentence Prisoners in Scotland, Scottish Office, Machin et al, 1999) shows that just over a quarter of the 491 life sentence prisoners released on licence were reconvicted.
19. Trends over time in reconviction rates will be affected by changes in criminal justice policy and practice, for example in the increasing use of alternatives to prosecution such as fiscal fines.
20. The following symbols are used throughout the tables in this bulletin:
| - | Nil | |
|
* | Less than 0.5 | |
|
n/a | Not available |
| Profile of offenders on Scottish Offenders Index with at least one conviction in 1989-99 |
|
Table A1 |
|
Sex of offender | ||||
|
Male | Female | Total(1) | ||
|
Number of offenders |
254,258 | 52,220 | 306,566 | |
| Number of convictions received | Percentages | |||
| All convictions | None | |||
| 1 or 2 |
70 | 81 | 72 | |
| 3 to 10 |
25 | 16 | 23 | |
| over 10 |
6 | 3 | 5 | |
| Sentences | ||||
|
Custodial convictions | None | 85 |
95 | 87 |
| 1 or 2 |
9 | 3 | 8 | |
| 3 to 10 |
4 | 1 | 4 | |
| over 10 |
1 | * | 1 | |
| Convictions resulting in probation | None |
89 | 88 | 89 |
| 1 or 2 |
9 | 10 | 9 | |
| 3 to 10 |
2 | 2 | 2 | |
| over 10 |
* | * | * | |
| Convictions resulting in community service | None |
88 | 94 | 89 |
| 1 or 2 |
11 | 6 | 10 | |
| 3 to 10 |
1 | * | 1 | |
| over 10 |
* | * | * | |
| Convictions resulting in a monetary penalty | None |
19 | 33 | 21 |
| 1 or 2 |
60 | 56 | 60 | |
| 3 to 10 |
20 | 10 | 18 | |
| over 10 |
1 | 1 | 1 | |
| Court procedure | ||||
|
Convictions in solemn proceedings |
None | 89 | 96 |
90 |
| 1 or 2 | 10 |
4 | 9 | |
| 3 to 10 |
1 | * | 1 | |
| over 10 |
- | - | - | |
| Convictions in summary proceedings | None |
3 | 2 | 3 |
| 1 or 2 |
68 | 80 | 70 | |
| 3 to 10 |
24 | 15 | 23 | |
| over 10 |
5 | 3 | 5 | |
| Type of crime (main offence) | ||||
| Convictions for violent crime | None |
60 | 72 | 62 |
| 1 or 2 |
35 | 26 | 34 | |
| 3 to 10 |
5 | 2 | 4 | |
| over 10 |
* | * | * | |
| Convictions for sexual crime | None |
98 | 100 | 98 |
| 1 or 2 |
2 | * | 2 | |
| 3 to 10 |
* | - | - | |
| over 10 |
* | - | - | |
| Convictions for housebreaking | None |
90 | 98 | 91 |
| 1 or 2 |
8 | 2 | 7 | |
| 3 to 10 |
2 | * | 2 | |
| over 10 |
* | * | * | |
| Convictions for dishonesty | None |
62 | 46 | 59 |
| 1 or 2 |
30 | 46 | 33 | |
| 3 to 10 |
7 | 7 | 7 | |
| over 10 |
1 | 1 | 1 | |
| Convictions for criminal damage | None |
83 | 93 | 85 |
| 1 or 2 |
16 | 7 | 14 | |
| 3 to 10 |
1 | * | 1 | |
| over 10 |
* | * | * | |
| Convictions for drug offences | None |
86 | 91 | 86 |
| 1 or 2 |
13 | 9 | 13 | |
| 3 to 10 |
1 | * | 1 | |
| over 10 |
- | - | - | |
| Convictions for breach of the peace | None |
60 | 75 | 62 |
| 1 or 2 |
34 | 22 | 32 | |
| 3 to 10 |
6 | 2 | 6 | |
| over 10 |
* | * | * | |
(1) Includes a small number of offenders where sex was not known.
| Offenders on Scottish Offenders
Index with at least one conviction in 1989-99 |
| Table A2 |
|
Sex of offender | |||
| Males | Females |
Total(1) | |
|
Number of offenders: | |||
|
Total number(=100%) | 254,258 | 52,220 |
306,566 |
| Number of convictions: | |||
| 1 or 2 |
70 | 81 | 72 |
| 3 to 5 |
17 | 11 | 16 |
| 6 to 10 |
8 | 4 | 7 |
| Over 10 |
6 | 3 | 5 |
|
Number of convictions: | |||
|
Total number(=100%) | 785,144 | 118,238 |
903,471 |
| Number of convictions: | |||
| 1 or 2 |
28 | 42 | 30 |
| 3 to 5 |
21 | 18 | 20 |
| 6 to 10 |
19 | 14 | 18 |
| Over 10 |
33 | 25 | 32 |
(1) Includes a small number of offenders where sex was not known.
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