Offenders 2016: Employment, Education and other Outcomes, 2016-2019

This new CSO Frontier Series Output, ‘Offenders 2016: Employment, Education and other Outcomes, 2016-2019’ is based on people enumerated in Irish prisons on Census Night 2016 and focuses on economic, educational, housing and other themes.

People in prison on Census Night included those held on remand, i.e., in custody pending trial. On Census Night 2016 (24 April) there were 3,791 people enumerated who resided in a prison. There were 530 people (about 14% of all prisoners) in custody on remand in April 2016, according to the Irish Prison Service¹.

This publication is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Output. 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, 19932, 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. For further information on the data sources, linking procedures and limitations of this report, see Methodology.

The age and sex profile of offenders included in this study are presented in Table 1.1. Over one-third (36.1%) of linked offenders are males in the 25-34 age bracket.

Of the 2,850 offenders for whom exploratory data matching was possible, 100.0% were successfully linked to an administrative data source either before or after April 2016. Matching was successful for 99.9% up to April 2016 and for 91.1% from May 2016 to May 2019.

The key findings of this report are:

1. Before and after April 2016, the primary 'economic status' of offenders is 'neither employment nor education'. This ranges from 60.4% in the last instance or occurrence up to April 2016 to 59.7% in May 2019.
2. ‘Education & training only’ is the next largest category with 34.2% identified up to April 2016 but this had dropped to 19.6% by May 2019.
3. ‘Substantial employment only’ accounted for the last activity of 4.5% of offenders up to April 2016 and this rose to 9.5% by May 2019.
4. Just 0.8% of offenders were in ’Education & training and substantial employment’ in the last occurrence up to April 2016 and this had risen slightly to 2.2% by May 2019.

Table 1.2 presents the summary results of this report as a breakdown of the last economic status recorded in administrative data for 2,850 offenders up to April 2016, the first record after April 2016, and the latest record up to May 2019. Table 1.2 presents the results by year from 2005 to 2019, with a delineation for 2016 for the periods January to April and May to December. For the detailed definitions of the economic status categories, see Methodology.

This report is an example of the policy-relevant research projects the CSO are developing as part of its leadership role in the Irish Statistical System. Our goal is to maximise the variety and volume of data available to provide high quality information to the Government, businesses and citizens, through the development of a National Data Infrastructure (NDI).

The NDI plays an integral part in facilitating the CSO to develop new and improved statistical products for the benefit of citizens and policymakers. The core concept of the NDI involves the collection, maintenance and storage on all public-sector data holdings, of the associated PPSN, Eircode and Unique Business Identifier (UBI) to be developed whenever they are relevant to Public Sector Body transactions with customers. This supports the development of targeted policy interventions.

Under the auspices of the Statistics Act 1993, and in compliance with all relevant data protection legislation, the CSO is in a unique position to gather and link administrative data sources held by Government departments and agencies and evaluate their potential for statistical use.

The demand for data and insight into Irish society continues to grow unabated. The growth is not just apparent in terms of the broad range of themes (e.g. globalisation, productivity and well-being) that Official Statisticians are being asked to provide information on but also in relation to the level of detail being required in the analysis (e.g. socio-demographic variables). It is clear that the range and depth of demand cannot be met from survey data alone but through analysis of new data sources including administrative records held by public sector bodies.  

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following people for their help and assistance in the production and compilation of this report.

Department of Justice and Equality

Alice Wainwright

Gurchand Singh

Sinead O'Neill

Central Statistics Office

Keith McSweeney - Social Analysis

Felix Colemen - Crime & Criminal Justice Statistics

Cormac Halpin - Census Outputs

Deirdre Lynch - Census Dissemination

Tim Linehan - Methodology

Footnotes

¹. Irish Prison Service Monthly Information Note

². Statistics Act 1993