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 less than 12 months 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 Proceedings1. 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 70%. This 70% relates to 5,027 people whose total custodial sentence in a case (accounting for all custodial sentences for all charges in the case) was for <=12 months. 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). The results of the matching process are detailed below. Where a person had multiple disposals (related to different cases) on the same day, these were grouped together for ease of matching. In this case, the overall sentences to be served may be over one year.