Reconviction Rates in Scotland: 2019-20 Offender Cohort

Plans for Reconviction statistics post-publication

In recognition that the data will continue to be affected by COVID and the court recovery programme for the foreseeable future, we plan to conduct further work to assess whether the measures used to produce these statistics are still the most appropriate to use for this data. We would welcome feedback from users on this and will provide any relevant updates via our usual channels.

Breaches of criminal law are divided into crimes and offences. This distinction is made only for statistical reporting purposes. Although the breaches allocated under "crimes" can generally be considered to be more serious, there are some "offences" that have more severe punishments associated with them than "crimes". The Scottish Government has recently consulted about changing the classification of some of these in response to the needs of users, and future publications may reflect the change.