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

[IwantToRetire]

Freed prisoners are committing a record number of serious further offences including murders, rapes and violent assaults, the chief inspector of probation has warned.

Almost 900 serious crimes have been recorded in the past year as being committed by offenders under supervision of probation after being released from jail or while serving community sentences.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/12/30/freed-prisoners-violent-crimes/

and at https://archive.is/F8wp0

Not clear if this includes those on early release because of over crowding.

Shocked to see that the largest number of victims are children under 13, and more likely than not to be girls.

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

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?

Yes, that would be very useful data.

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.

Well I just dont know what to think, but cant believe, and these after all are the recorded cases, that 2 children under 13 are raped / sexually assaulted every week.

Rape

(1)A person (A) commits an offence if—
(a)he intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of another person (B) with his penis,
(b)B does not consent to the penetration, and
(c)A does not reasonably believe that B consents.

(2)Whether a belief is reasonable is to be determined having regard to all the circumstances, including any steps A has taken to ascertain whether B consents.

(3)Sections 75 and 76 apply to an offence under this section.

(4)A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable, on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for life.

Sorry, not interested in this whatabouterry. Whether there's an increase or is a new type of offence for the person concerned.

That isn't the issue.

The issue is that prisoners on probation are committing serious crimes.

Or are we just supposed to think having prisoners on probation is alwasy a risk, and as it seems to mainly be women who suffer, its not really a problem.

Admittedly surprised to see that domestic violence does not feature in this list of horror.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Before we shoot of into another whatabouterry, to quote from the article, included in the OP:

Almost 900 serious crimes have been recorded in the past year as being committed by offenders under supervision of probation after being released from jail or while serving community sentences.

ie convicted criminals.

Probation is a court-ordered sentence where you avoid prison (or get released early) with supervision, while parole is an early release from prison, after serving part of a sentence, also under supervision, with the key difference being timing and authority: probation is a judge's decision at sentencing, whereas parole is a board's decision after incarceration, with both requiring adherence to rules.

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.)

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

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.

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

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.

I am saying the figures themselves are horrific.

Whether or not they are an increase, as a result of parole or probation.

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.

If you are interested in other issues, eg age, repeat offenders, race or whatever find data about that to form a basis.

In the meantime it is totally disgusting that over 100 under 13 have suffered sexual assault or rape by a convicted criminal who is finishing their sentence on parole or probation.

I agree that finances have probably contributed to this situation, but irrespective of that it still means that in 107 (probably more) men were inadequately assesed for parole / probatiion, or just as likely thought that the damage they would almost certainly do will be against members of a less important section of society. Females.