Journey times in the Scottish Criminal Justice System: analysis of equality factors of accused disposed in court
This paper investigates how the median journey times (from offence to verdict) for accused persons prosecuted in Scottish courts vary by their sex, age, ethnicity and socio-economic status (as measured by the Social Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD))
Median offence to verdict times for accused by ethnic group are shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Distribution of median offence to verdict times by ethnic group.
Note: Outliers have been removed from the chart to allow a clearer view of the central tendency and spread of the data. Number of case-accused considered in each group and the corresponding percentages of the total are shown in the tables in the Annex.
The analysis showed variation in median journey times for the different ethnic groups, with accused in the Asian category having the longest median journey time (279 days) and accused in the Other White British and Other White categories having the shortest median journey time (198 and 199 days respectively).
The Kruskal-Wallis test showed that there are significant differences in journey times between ethnic groups (p = 2.2e-16). Mann-Whitney U tests were performed comparing the journey time for all ethnic groups to determine if journey time differed between individual groups. The results of the analysis are shown in Table 3 of the Annex.
Table 3 shows that journey times for White groups (White Scottish, Other White British and Other White) are significantly shorter than for all other ethnic groups. The journey times for Other White British and Other White were not significantly different but both groups had significantly shorter journey times than the White Scottish group.
Median journey times in the Asian group were significantly longer than for all other ethnic groups.
Contact
Email: justice_analysts@gov.scot