Prison Re-offending Statistics 2011 - 2018

The Central Statistics Office’s (CSO’s) prison and probation re-offending indicators are established by examining crime incidents in PULSE that lead to a court conviction for the relevant reference period in which the re-offending is being measured. Historically, these re-offending indicators have excluded PULSE incidents that relate to certain road and traffic related incidents (RTIs). In an update to the methodology for the most recent publication of prison re-offending (Prison Re-offending Estimates 2011-2018), RTIs that have previously been excluded will now be included as a re-offending indicator. This will help identify re-offending if there are more serious offences linked to the same re-offender around the same initial RTI. Due to how crime was sometimes counted by An Garda Síochána, some incidents recorded on PULSE did not fully reflect other offences for some re-offenders in a small number of cases. The impact of the changes, taking the reference year 2015 as an example, means an extra 103 re-offenders have been identified bringing the number of re-offenders for that year to 1,607 from 1,504, with the three-year and one-year re-offending rates increasing by around 4 and 7 percentage points respectively. The general trend of a reduction in re-offending levels over time still holds.

The exclusion of incident types related to road and traffic offences was designed to exclude a group of offences that are mostly managed by the Fixed Notice Act (2010), also known as the penalty points system. Road traffic offences that are administered using the penalty points system do not on their own meet the threshold of a court conviction needed to be traditionally considered a re-offending indicator. Therefore, to provide a degree of consistency of threshold for re-offending indicators, the CSO have also historically excluded the same incident types when they were administered via the courts system (and outside of the penalty points system). The existing process of excluding RTIs, while achieving a degree of consistency with respect to sanctions from the penalty points system, resulted in a small number of re-offenders not being counted in the re-offending measures, as explained as follows:

1. The method of excluding road traffic events has historically used PULSE’s INCIDENT codes, however the primary indicator for the CSO’s re-offending series is a convicted OFFENCE. Although the two types of events (Incidents and Offences) often have a strong relationship, using incident codes to exclude offences lacks the required consistency. Table 7.3 in the appendix lists the offence types that are linked to the additional 103 re-offenders from 2015 data.
2. When an individual is initially detected in relation to a road traffic event, the incident tends to remain defined in PULSE as an RTI even when the resulting convictions can include multiple offences not just defined as RTIs. For example, a speeding incident can also create charges and resulting convictions that involve offences related to justice procedures (e.g. non-payment of resulting fine) and/or public order offences (e.g. abusive behaviour towards a Garda member). As the individual is initially classified under the RTI which is being excluded by the RTI filter, significant resulting offences can also get unintentionally excluded.

e.g. Data from 2015 shows that an additional 103 individuals who were identified as re-offenders when RTI related incidents were included as re-offending indicators equated to 11 additional incident types (Table 7.2) which then equated to 55 different offences (Table 7.3). The exclusion process had the effect of excluding offences such as Hit and Run, Theft and Dangerous Driving as re-offending indicators.

The An Garda Síochána Crime Counting Rules (PDF 440KB)  outline that incidents on PULSE should be defined/counted by the most serious offence (based on court sanction. However, in our examination of the data, it can be seen historically, that incidents initially related to Road and Traffic events tended to remain classified as RTIs and were not re-classified to incidents that matched the resulting (more serious) offences from court proceedings in a limited number of cases.

Figure 7.1 provides a comparison of the CSO’s prison re-offending estimates with and without the use of incidents relating to RTIs. The overall effect is an increase in prison re-offending estimates by approximately 4 percentage points for three-year re-offending and 7 percentage points for one-year re-offending estimates.

The inclusion of RTIs that had previously been excluded as re-offending indicators from the CSO’s re-offending series improves the scope of the re-offending estimates.  The update also allows a more detailed analysis of re-offending that relates to RTI related sanctions and particularly in relation to criminal activities that result in multiple charges and offences.