Prisoners on probabtion account for at least one murder and two rapes every week of the year

Remember that ONS don't include offences against minors in the national statistics, (they also used to have an upper age limit but that was scrapped) so that can make it harder to track them unless you already know where to look.

''The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) provides the best measure of victimisation and estimated that 1.9% of people (3.0% of females and 0.7% of males) aged 16 years and over were victims of sexual assault (including attempts) in year ending (YE) March 2025 survey; this equates to around 900,000 people (739,000 females and 162,000 males).''

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/sexualoffencesinenglandandwalesoverview/yearendingmarch2025

This.

There can't be efficient supervision if many practitioners work at 150-200% capacity.

PPs and OP need to read into the wider issues before criticising.

Worse still, the inspectorate have been warning us for years.

Ok, thanks for your comments @Manteiga.

The "most striking" part about the probation report demonstrates the poor state of the probation service in every aspect.

Thank you to OP for raising this matter.

Perhaps the most striking part of the 2025 report:

Concerningly, we found in 91 per cent of the SFO reviews, the risk of serious harm categories assigned to the case by the probation service had been inaccurately assessed. This meant that in most cases the overall risk of serious harm level was incorrect, the relevant categories and those at risk were not adequately identified, and/or the nature of the risk of serious harm posed by the individual was not captured accurately in the assessment.

From 2024:

As already highlighted in this report, HM Inspectorate of Probation quality assured 87 reviews from April 2023 to April 2024. Of those reviews, 62 were identified as having inaccuracies in the risk of serious harm assessment, which equates to 71 per cent.

From 2023:

In 58 per cent of the 86 reviews
quality assured, the SFO reviewing
manager, or our quality assurance
inspector, considered that at some point in the supervision period the
assessment of risk of serious harm
completed by the probation
practitioner was inaccurate or did not fully consider the nature and extent
of the risks presented by the
individual.

2022:

Practitioners are underestimating the nature and level of risk of serious harm that
the person on probation poses, which means they do not always recognise or
respond to emerging risk factors. This is exacerbated by practitioners focusing on
providing support, to the detriment of managing risk and delivering offence-focused
intervention

Of course it's fair to wonder if some of these criminals oughtn't to have been granted parole, or have been given a non-custodial sentence; but it seems that the probation service have been getting worse at assessing risks for years.

I agre that we don't know how many of the 107 convictions that arose from charges brought in 2023-24 of offences pertaining to victims under 13. But I suggest that somewhere in the order of 100 charges were brought in 2024-25 of offences pertaining to victims under 13 - the 10 that are listed are only a 1 in 5 sample of the 1 in 2 for which reviews were completed.

Yes, that's true. But what I am disputing is that all of those rapes and sexual assaults were on children under 13. They were not - in fact as you pointed out yourself:

"The first row of that table totals four separate offences, only two of which specify victims under 13."

so yes, two assaults a week is roughly what that represents, but on people many of whom are adults. The figures are not clearly shown and it is an opaque way of labelling them to stuff 4 separate categories into one line.

The 10 offences specifying victims under 13 are not "of the 107" - the 107 are notifications of certain serious further offences from 2023-24 that resulted in convictions. The 10 come from a 20% random sample of all reviews of SFOs notified in 2024-25, so you'd expect around another 40 that weren't sampled. And only about half the notifications of SFOs from 2024-25 had been reviewed at the time of writing the report - it might be that these kind of offences get reviewed more urgently or less urgently, or that there'd be another 50. Two per week seems a reasonable rough estimate (though of charges, not convictions).

The figures are released quarterly and the most recently available are from June 2025. There were 244,209 people subject to Probation supervision at that point.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-april-to-june-2025/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-april-to-june-2025

The only acceptable level is nil.

Some more context would perhaps help the discussion, such as the number of people granted probation in each year. The use of 2021/22 as a base may be misleading given there were still some Covid restrictions and court delays.

This is appalling. And these are the ones daft enough to get caught. Not every offence, everyone who was caught. This population may be more likely to be caught (more closely monitored, daft enough to be caught before) but as PP has said, the Probation service isn’t superhuman and I doubt we are seeing every offence here.

The figures say that in the period concerned 107 children under 13 were raped or sexually assualted.

Why start speculating about this that or the other, as though this is just an starting of point to raise other issues.

No the figures do not say that. Rape and sexual assaults include a small number of children under 13. In the figures that I quoted from the report, less than 10 children under 13 out of the 107 people were sexually assaulted et cetera.

I have not been speculating or using it to raise other issues. I am trying to discuss the point that you raised. But your interpretation of the figures was wrong.

And it’s all men..

Prisoners who are supervised by probation officers commit crimes, yes, it's nothing new.
Probation officers are not superheroes on Orwellian 24/7 watch stopping them from any possible criminal activity. They are human beings doing a very difficult job in particularly difficult circumstances, especially for the last decade.

Of course they are always a risk, are you delusional or just daft? They are risk assessed. It's nothing new women and children are more at risk too. We always are. Majority of former prisoners are men. They are now being released from prisons very quickly which is wrong, but the prison and criminal justice system has practically collapsed under the Conservatives. Labour have no idea how to fix this. Do you know? Awesome, if so. Do tell.

Many prisoners that are being released quickly would have been in for sex offences. Of course they are at high risk of reoffending and the victims would be vulnerable people - women and children. The risk is even higher because there aren't enough probation officers to supervise massively increased releases from prisons and recalls.

Not sure what you're getting at or expecting from this thread but you're banging at the wrong door on this occasion. The entire criminal justice system does not protect us or our children and never has, not probation.

I work in the system and I'm genuinely surprised by these stats. That's appalling.

Agree with you. Frankly it’s a fucking outrage and suggests “being let out on probation” doesn’t work for members of the public who may be raped or murdered by the prisoner on probation.

The victim might be my child or your child.

The legal system isn’t keeping the general public safe. It’s horrifying.

?
What the statistics you've posted actually mean is surely to the point?

I wonder when they'll get the message that it isn't women and children who have to change their behaviour.

If they are, then we ought to be looking at why prison isn't reforming them, and whether these people can ever be safely let out. And we ought to build more prisons, because an increase in national population will mean a proportionate increase in offenders.

Because the criminal justice system never really reforms people, and is based on a misapprehension of what what human beings are actually like.

Until the relatively recent past, prison was mostly just a holding space for people waiting trial, or holding spaces for people who had been sentenced to death, only to have their sentences commuted. Until 1832 there was over two hundred capital crimes in Britain, so you could end up hanging from a rope for a wide variety of different offences. This was challenged by the prison reform movement, which was driven by religious faith; a lot of the early prison reformers were Quakers. What they were working towards was the redemption of prisoners in a Christian sense. Redemption is harder when people are dead, so the reformers were keeping people alive so that they could consider their activity and find religion. Prisons (and workhouses, and a lot of other institutions) in Britain during the nineteenth century were focused rather heavily on redeeming the souls of sinners.

As this form of redemption went out of fashion around the end of the nineteenth century it was reframed as a psychological transformation, but left largely unchanged. The notion of reform from this point onwards (and which remains largely present today) is that criminals are broken people, and we use prisons to fix them. This doesn't take into account the fact that criminals may actively and consciously be wanting to carry out criminal acts. A redemption arc may be an appropriate framing for a young person who does not fully understand the consequences of their actions, but may not represent the situation of the average criminal. Certainly, there are people who will be deterred from carrying out further crimes by their experience in prison, but recidivism rates show that this not a universal experience.

So what to do? Probably send some criminals to prison for longer, particular with certain types of crime. This is expensive, but remember that all crimes have costs, and, at the current time, an awful lot of these are borne by the public.

Yes - I found it very difficult to understand what you meant by whatabouterry because this is a very unpleasant subject and difficult to think about, and it is necessary to analyse the information to some extent. As the information provided is incomplete, it is difficult to analyse it.

The way some people seem to have interpreted the figures is that all of the crimes for sexual violence have been committed on children under 13 - this is not true. The figures come from a lengthy and detailed report by the probation service. They have been distilled in the newspaper article to supposedly make them easier to digest although it doesn't.

The number of offenders on probation supervision in England and Wales during the time of the latest report which was one year April '24 to April '25 was 244,209. The number of Serious Further Offences (SFO) reported from this group was 872. If you work out the percentage, that is less than half of one percent, 0.36% of the total.

There were more figures available regarding a breakdown of the types of crimes committed, and crimes against children under 13 were a very small percentage of the total. For instance,

A random selection of 20% of FOC reviews showed:
14 Murder
3 Attempted murder
4 Manslaughter
42 Rape
2 Attempted rape
7 Assault by penetration
4 Sexual assault of a child under 13
1 Arson with intent to endanger life
5 Attempting to cause/incite a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity
1 Engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a child under 13
6 Death by dangerous driving
1 Possession of a document of use for terrorism
90 Total

The problem with looking at graphs of statistics is that it's difficult to know how to read the data. It is the headline that catches your attention.

Roughly half of the convicted criminals were on probation but not in prison, serving community sentences, and the other half were people who had been released from prison and on probation.

hmiprobation.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/document/annual-report-2025-serious-further-offences/#15-Pressrelease

https://www.gov.uk/guide-to-probation

Probation means you’re serving your sentence but you’re not in prison.
You could be put on probation because:

• you’re serving a community sentence
• you have been released from prison on licence or on parole

(In the U.K. at any rate.)

All of this extremely disturbing information has to be looked at in the context of changes made to the probation service. The probation service was partly privatised in 2014, splitting it into two parts. 21 different companies (Community Rehabilitation companies) took over supervision of low and medium risk offenders with payment tied to reoffending figures. The National Probation service, a public sector body, was responsible for managing high-risk offenders and court work.

This was a controversial move and it proved to be an expensive failure. In 2021 the probation service was re-nationalised. It has still not recovered.

A friend of mine was working in the probation service at the time of this change, so I took an interest in its downward trajectory.