05 October 2020
Go to release: Offenders 2016: Employment, Education and other Outcomes, 2016-2019
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (05 October 2020) published Offenders 2016: Employment, Education & other Outcomes, 2016 - 2019. This publication analyses outcomes from 2016 – 2019 for persons enumerated in prison settings on Census Night 2016, which took place on 24 April of that year. It examines outcomes in terms of education & training, substantial employment, earnings and other themes such as housing.
Commenting on the report, Michael Courtney, Statistician, said: ‘The most recent activity in May 2019 for one-in-ten (11.7%) offenders was substantial employment while for just over two-in-ten (22.7%) it was education & training.
One-fifth of offenders (22.7%) were last identified in education & training up to April 2016.
The highest level of education for more than half (57.0%) of offenders up to May 2019 was the Junior Certificate or less.
More than half (59.7%) of offenders were not in education or employment up to May 2019, but were in other administrative sources such as records from the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection.‘
Commenting further on the report, Declan Smyth, Senior Statistician, said: ‘This publication is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Publication. Particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this release. CSO Frontier Series may use new methods which are under development and / or data sources which may be incomplete, for example new administrative data sources. Publishing outputs under the Frontier series allows the CSO to provide useful new information to users and get informed feedback on these new methods and outputs whilst at the same time make sure that the limitations are well explained and understood.
In using the increasingly varied sources of data available, the CSO must ensure that we continue to protect and secure data. Our aim is to ensure that citizens can live in an informed society while at the same time ensuring adherence to all relevant data protection legislation.
In this report, of the 3,791 persons enumerated on Census Night 2016 in Irish prisons, 75.2% (2,850) were successfully linked to other pseudonymised administrative data sources including Revenue, Department of Education, Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection among others. This report presents a statistical overview of the economic status of the linked 2,850 offenders only.
As well as the strict legal protections set out in the Statistics Act, 1993, and other existing regulations, we are committed to protecting individual privacy and all identifiable information from each of the data sources used in our analysis, such as name, date of birth and addresses, are removed before use and only anonymised statistical aggregates are produced.’
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