To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what recent estimate he has made of the number of prisoners who are suffering from substance misuse problems who have been released from prison in each of the last five years. (300805)

The following table sets out the number of prisoners assessed at either pre-release or start of licence as having an offending-related risk factor relating to ‘drug misuse’. The assessment of offending-related risk factors was made through the Offender Assessment System (OASys) which is only applied to young adult prisoners and to adult prisoners serving sentences of more than 12 months. Figures are presented for the past four years (2005-08) as the electronic OASys system was still being implemented in 2004. The number of assessments used to produce the figures increased from 28,064 in 2005 to 33,471 in 2008. The data are drawn from administrative IT systems and are subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale assessment and recording system.