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

And again to clarify. This data table is showing the only categories of offences that are defined as ‘Serious Further Offences’ by the MoJ. It’s a very small and specific group of offences and offenders will have to be actively supervised or have finished supervision within 28 days of the offence taking place to be included in this data.

Sadly, rape, assault by penetration and attempted rape of children under 13 in these statistics does not include historical offences, indecent images or attempted or actual sexual communication with a child. And boys are actually at greater risk than girls in certain age groups.

The data on offences committed by people released on early release schemes is definitely being collected but I can’t recall seeing anything published yet.

This is confusing to lump together.

Prisoners out in the community on licence committing these crimes is important to look at if these figures are increasing with early release schemes and whether mistakes were made ie should they have been recalled if on full licence.

NB for short sentences they move onto post sentence supervision and aren't recallable for the last part of their sentence (up to a year).

For those on community orders it's not surprising as someone with a criminal past is more likely to commit further crime. The probation service can help reduce that, but they can't lock them up when indicators of increased risk are present.

Looking at those stats I would query the sexual assaults on under 13s. There are a lot of historic cases going through the courts, but I wouldn't be surprised if they included images offences which tend to come as multiple convictions per court appearance for different time periods, categories of images, engagement with a decoy, etc.

To clarify. People on probation can either be subject to licence and in some cases Post Sentence Supervision depending on the length of a prison sentence. A determinate prison sentence usually has 40 or 50% in custody depending on the type of offence and then the rest in the community supervised by the Probation Service. Indeterminate and extended sentences have different rules but still have Probation supervision, usually for longer periods of time.

Community Orders and Suspended Sentence Orders are supervised by the Probation Service if there is a rehabilitative requirement on the order, such as a behavioural programme or rehabilitation activities.

All the offenders mentioned in this report were subject to Probation supervision in some form. The Probation Service is in utter crisis. The On Probation blog hosted by Jim Brown gives a platform for Probation staff to comment anonymously and has recorded the decimation of the service. It’s worth dipping into. A Google search will find it quickly.

Also, ‘domestic violence’ does not exist on its own as a crime category. Offences such as Murder, serious assault, sexual offences, intentional strangulation, stalking etc recorded in this context will include a range of victims including those due to domestic violence. It should however be possible to drill down into that data to identify and group types of victims.

No, people are on probation either because they got a Community Order, or because they've been released from prison on parole. The Probation Service deals with both sorts, and both are included in these figures.

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

Gah, I'm conflating probation and parole. Probationers have not been to prison for the offence.

You can delete all of "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" from the above.

I think looking at the numbers it would be interesting to see if the numbers of people being released has increased.
As in, are the number of crimes going up because there more people being released on probation.

People who have never been imprisoned also commit serious crimes. The question is whether probationers are more likely to commit serious crimes than the general population. Intuitively, the answer is going to be "yes", but I'd want to evidence and quantify that.

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.

It would be interesting to know if it’s too early release, too little supervision, a difference in demographics, what is happening? Because it looks significant.

As the population increases, we will need more prison spaces. This should be a no-brainer.

I would need to know how many probationers there were in total for each year, by sex and offence category, in order to gauge the risk these people pose compared to the general population. That data isn't in the report.

Yes, that would be very useful data.

It might be enlightening to see a breakdown of what they were in prison for, side by side with what they did when they were released. For instance, is the high level of sexual offence against children something unexpected compared with their previous offences, or does it indicate that previous sex offenders against children are too readily released/not imprisoned?

Also interesting to note which crimes are and aren't increasing