Hearings in Scottish courts - ethnicity of individuals: analysis

This occasional paper presents new experimental analysis based on the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service’s management information, on the ethnicity of individuals who were proceeded against and sentenced from April 2016 to February 2023.

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5 Further Work

This analysis has identified some trends in prosecutions, convictions and sentencing. Due to the data issues identified in earlier sections, care needs to be taken when interpreting these results. As a consequence, the analysis in this report is experimental and is not on its own sufficiently robust to be used, for example, to inform policy recommendations. As this is the first iteration of this analysis we anticipated that there could be issues with the data and work is underway to make improvements.

Furthermore, the current analysis has relied on population estimates from the 2011 census data for comparisons of findings to the general population. This could be updated with 2022 Census data after it is available, so as to provide a more up-to-date assessment of differences across ethnic groups.

While the current analysis has not been able to consider any causal factors that might explain the observed trends, it does identify where further work could be undertaken to explore the trends identified.

Contact

Email: Justice_Analysts@gov.scot

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