How to make sentencing data work better for everyone: our evidence
In late August, we submitted evidence to the Justice Select Committee’s inquiry into ‘public opinion and understanding of sentencing.’
In short, we’re recommending that the Ministry of Justice should:
Make it easier to access the high-quality sentencing data it already publishes
Add court-level breakdowns to its public statistics, to help explain local disparities in sentencing - a topic of great public interest
Make anonymised judge-level data available to researchers, to help researchers understand how judge age, background etc affect sentencing.
This would help researchers, policymakers and everyone else better understand how our justice system works.
Why worry about sentencing data?
The Select Committee’s inquiry is prompted by a recent study that found that the public’s understanding of sentencing is poor.
Most people under-estimate the severity of current sentencing practices - e.g. average sentence lengths have risen in recent years, but that isn’t widely known. When perceptions are out of line with reality, it undermines public confidence in the justice system.
So the Select Committee asked:
How does the public access information on sentencing?
What could be done to improve public understanding of sentencing?
What we found
We were interested in this, because we know from our research on justice data gaps that MPs, researchers and journalists struggle to get answers to basic questions about sentencing.
So we looked at:
the questions that such stakeholders have asked about sentencing
the statistics that are currently publicly available, and what is missing to help answer those questions
the underlying databases that power these statistics, to understand how they could be improved.
We made three recommendations:
MoJ should make it easier to access the (rich) data that already exists. The main public source for sentencing data is the Ministry of Justice’s Crown Court data tool and magistrates’ court data too. These pivot tables let you break down sentencing lengths by offence type, age, ethnicity etc, and are far more powerful than they first appear - but they are fiddly to use and not well signposted. We recommend the MoJ better signpost this data (by making it easier for search engines to find), make it more accessible, publish more written commentary on sentencing trends, and invest in outreach. None of this should be expensive.
MoJ should add court-level data to help explain disparities in sentencing. The published data shows significant disparities in sentencing, but doesn’t include enough data to explain them. In 2017, the Lammy Review recommended that sentencing information for individual courts should be published broken down by characteristics including gender and ethnicity. This recommendation has not been met. Our research suggests it should be straightforward to add court-level information. This would help tackle sentencing disparities and support public scrutiny, as called for in the Lammy Review.
MoJ should make (anonymised) judge-level data available to researchers. Plenty of research exists to suggest that the characteristics of individual judges affect sentencing outcomes. We recommend that anonymised judge identifiers and information on characteristics should be made available through the MoJ’s Data First programme - this would help researchers understand whether judges’ sex, age, time on the bench, and type of court affect sentencing outcomes.
What next
We’re pleased that the Justice Committee are looking at this, and will continue feeding these findings into our broader project of mapping data gaps in the justice system. If you are interested in this work, you can read our interim report here, or do get in touch.