Criminal Justice System statistics quarterly: March 2022
Overview of trends in the use of out of court disposals, defendants prosecuted, offenders convicted, remand and sentencing decisions in England and Wales.
Applies to England and Wales
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This report presents key statistics on activity in the criminal justice system for England and Wales. It provides information up to the year ending March 2022 with accompanying commentary, analysis and presentation of longer-term trends.
Statistician’s comment:
The figures published today, for year ending March 2022, continued to be influenced by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on criminal court prosecutions and outcomes. The Criminal Justice System (CJS) is continuing to recover - prosecutions have increased by 27% in the latest year but remain 14% lower compared to pre-pandemic levels. Convictions have also increased in the latest year, by 31%, though they are down by 13% since the year ending March 2020. While the number of people convicted for most offence groups have fallen over the last two years, they have risen for violence and sexual offences in each of the last two years.
The custody rate for indictable offences has fallen slightly in the latest year to 32%. However, for those serious cases resulting in custody, average custodial sentence length continues to increase to a high of 25.7 months for indictable offences. This has increased year-on-year (from 16.8 in 2012), with the only decrease in year ending March 2021 likely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Updates to this page
Last updated 26 October 2022 + show all updates
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This page has been updated to include information on issues that have arisen whilst reviewing and improving our data processing since this publication. Although this has a small effect on the overall numbers for prosecutions, convictions and sentencing outcomes, users should consult the known issues tab of the tables and associated tools to understand any impacts on specific offences.
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First published.