Figures for number of (a) adult and (b) juvenile offenders sentenced for indictable offences in England and Wales between 2000 and 2008 with no previous convictions or cautions are presented in the following table.
Adult Juvenile All sentenced offenders2 First time offenders3 Percentage of first time offenders All sentenced offenders2 First time offenders3 Percentage of first time offenders 2000 269,637 32,950 12.2 52,269 6,659 12.7 2001 267,979 31,929 11.9 52,844 6,504 12.3 2002 283,444 31,240 11.0 52,538 6,395 12.2 2003 288,261 30,882 10.7 49,998 5,885 11.8 2004 271,717 30,846 11.4 51,138 6,162 12.0 2005 255,460 29,531 11.6 52,775 6,142 11.6 2006 250,384 28,436 11.4 52,942 5,764 10.9 2007 258,424 28,309 11.0 55,307 5,637 10.2 2008 274,657 28,687 10.4 50,835 5,148 10.1 1 Excluding offenders whose age at sentence was not recorded on the PNC. 2 Counts of person sentenced during the year. An offender may be counted more than once if he or she has been sentenced more than once during the year. 3 Offenders who have never been cautioned or convicted previously.
These figures are taken from Table 6.4 of ‘Sentencing Statistics 2008’ which was published on 28 January 2010 and can be found at:
http://www.justice.gov.uk/publications/sentencingannual.htm
The figures have been drawn from the police's administrative IT system, the police national computer, which, as with any large scale recording system, is subject to possible errors with data entry and processing. The figures are provisional and subject to change as more information is recorded by the police.