Question reference: S6W-24127
- Asked by: Liam McArthur, MSP for Orkney Islands, Scottish Liberal Democrats
- Date lodged: 20 December 2023
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Current status: Answered by Angela Constance on 16 January 2024
Question
To ask the Scottish Government what the (a) longest and (b) average time spent on remand was for people under the age of 18 in (i) 2020-21, (ii) 2021-22, (iii) 2022-23 and (iv) 2023 to date.
Answer
Data covering the period 2020-23 is available via the published National Statistics on the Scottish Prison Population.
Period | a) longest | b) average (median) days |
i) 2020-21 | 301 | 17 |
ii) 2021-22 | 263 | 8 |
iii) 2022-23 | 387 | 9 |
In line with prison statistics reporting conventions, we provide here the average expressed as the median rather than the mean due to the long-tailed shape of the distribution.
Information about time spent on remand for the period iv) April 2023 to December 2023 is only available via Scottish Government collections of management information. The values provided by this source are not directly comparable with those provided by our National Statistics data.
Using this management information, the longest time spent on remand by under 18s was 242 days in 2023 Q2-Q4, and the average (median) time spent on remand was 8 days.