Letter to Baroness Masham of Ilton from the Director of Finance of the Prison Service, Mr. Brian Landers, dated 18th March 1996.

Lady Blatch has asked me, in the absence of the Director General from the office, to reply to your recent Question asking what was the average custodial population of offenders aged under 17 and under 21 respectively in 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1995; how many of these were on remand; and how many were serving sentences of (a) under 12 months, (b) 12 months or more but under four years, and (c) four years or more.

The available information is for the prison population of young offenders at 30 June each year. Statistics for the years 1992 to 1994 are published in Prison statistics, England and Wales (Cm 3087 for the 1994 edition), copies of which are available from the Library. Table 3.2 gives the breakdown of the young offender prison population by age by type of custody. Table 3.1 shows an analysis by sentence length for all sentenced young offenders, which includes some 21 year-olds who were under 21 when sentenced. Information for 30 June 1995 is given in the attached table (1). The sentence length breakdown requested for young offenders aged under 17 for 30 June 1992 to 1995 is shown in table 2.