Young People in Custody

[Supplementary Tables A2, B2, and M1]

The number of young people (aged under 21) in prison in Scotland remained stable, increasing by less than 1% from the previous year and remaining far below historic levels. On an average day in 2024-25 there were 170 young people in prison in Scotland.

The overall population of young people in custody broken down by legal status is provided in Figure 20. This shows that across all legal status groups there was minimal change in population sizes. There were 41 young people untried on an average day in 2024-25 (-4 from 2023-24), 18 convicted awaiting sentence (+1) and 110 sentenced (+4).

Figure 20: While there has been a long-term decline in the population of young people in custody, there has been broad stability in the population level since 2022-23

Young people (aged under 21) in prison by legal status – average daily populations, 2009-10 to 2024-25

The proportion of young people in custody on remand (untried and CAS) has been consistently higher than that of the prison population as a whole, and was 35% overall in 2024-25.

Index offence groups

[Supplementary Tables M2]

As shown in Figure 21there was a increase of 5 in the sentenced population with index offences in group 1, from 56 on an average day in 2023-24 to 61 in 2024-25. This group made up just over half of the sentenced population of young people.

Overall however there has been little change across the index offence groups between 2023-24 and 2024-25.

Figure 21: There has been little change across the index offence group in 2024-25

Index offence groups of sentenced young people (under 21) – average daily populations, 2009-10 to 2024-25

Index sentences

[Supplementary table M3]

Figure 22 shows the index sentence[i] profile of the (average daily) population of young people under 21. For clarity of presentation, the range of shorter sentence bands presented in the supplementary tables and in the interactive analysis tool have been combined in the charts in this section into the ‘≤ 1 year’ group.

While there was small growth in the population with an index sentence ‘≤ 1 year’ (from 28 to 39) there was little change in other index sentence groups in 2024-25.

Figure 22: There is a small increase in 2024-25 in the shortest index sentence group of young people but little change across the others

Index sentences of young people (under 21) – average daily populations, 2009-10 to 2024-25