High Level Summary of Statistics Trend Last update: Thursday, September 15, 2011
Prison population
After the steady increase observed since 2000-01, the prison population has dropped slightly to an annual daily average of 7,853 for 2010-11. This represents a fall of 1 per cent from the previous year, and suggests that the prison population has stabilised in the short term although levels remain very high in relation to the current design capacity of about 7,330. It is difficult to tell at this stage whether this represents the beginning of a longer term levelling out of the prison population, as this has shown short-term peaks and troughs over the past 20 years while the underlying longer term trend has been upward.
The current dip is primarily due to marked drops in the young offender population for both remand and direct sentenced prisoners by 14 and 17 per cent respectively.
The sentenced population has dropped by 1 per cent overall, reaching 6,378 in 2010-11. This is due to a decrease across most sentence groups, apart from the life sentence and recall populations which have increased by 5 and 10 per cent respectively.
The graph below illustrates the change in the average daily prison population from 2001-02 to 2010-11 for different categories of prisoner: remand, short-term (sentenced to less than 4 years) and long-term (sentenced to 4 years and over, including life and recalls to custody).
View chart data
Source: Prison Statistics Scotland
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