Short custodial disposals from court and the prison population

To ensure that the results of this study were as recent as possible, information on people receiving custodial disposals of 12 months or less in court in 2023 were extracted from the data used for the Scottish Government disposals dashboard[1]. These data are based on Management Information received directly from the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service. These data provide a more recent picture of short sentences but numbers may differ slightly from the Criminal Proceedings data quoted above because of the nature of the data sets. For comparison, the percentage of people receiving a short custodial sentence in 2021-22 in the disposals data was 73%, which is the same as the published figure from Criminal Proceedings[2].

At the time of this study, the latest disposals data available was for Jan-Dec 2023. The proportion of people receiving short sentences in the disposals data in 2023 was 73%. This 73% relates to 5,371 people whose total custodial sentence in a case (accounting for all custodial sentences for all charges in the case) was for 12 months or less. These people were matched to daily custody records from the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) using the Scottish Crime Records Office (SCRO) number (a unique person identifier used across the justice system in Scotland).

Where a person had multiple disposals (related to different cases) on the same day, these were grouped together for ease of matching. In such cases, the overall sentences to be served may be over one year.