These statistics are categorised as Under Reservation. This categorisation indicates that the quality of these statistics do not meet the standards required of official statistics published by the CSO.
For further information please refer to the Under Reservation FAQ page.
This publication provides figures for the re-offending rates of individuals released from prison or having received a court fine sentence in the years 2011 to 2017 (the 2011 to 2017 cohorts).
The term “offences” in this report refers to crime incidents known to An Garda Síochána and recorded as such in the Garda PULSE (Police Using Leading Systems Effectively) system. Because of timing issues with respect to the extraction of data, figures may be revised after this publication.
CSO's publication of prison related re-offending has been adjusted to include some methodological updates.
Further methodological details are available at: Prison Re-offending Estimates 2011-2017 Technical Note
There are 3 key changes that have taken place:
1. The release date of prisoners now incorporates early release dates to measure the time periods to re-offending incidents. Early release takes place when a prisoner receives a reduction in their custodial period and is released earlier than the court sentence they received. Historically, only the courts custodial release date was used to calculate periods to re-offending incidents. Incorporating the early release data has resulted in:
2. A re-committal to prison by a released prisoner during the re-offending periods (3 and 1 year) has now been included as a re-offending indicator in addition to the existing Garda PULSE identifiers of incidents and convictions. It has resulted in:
3. Prison related re-offending is now separated into custodial and fine sentence re-offending indicators. The update aims to provide a clearer indicator of re-offending related to two different forms of sanction. "Custodial / Prison re-offending" indicators are focused on prisoners who have served custodial sentences while fine sentence related re-offending is mainly related to non-custodial reprimands.
Overall, 6.9% of individuals who received a sanction of a fine sentence from court served a custodial period greater than 1 day between 2011 to 2017. See Table 8.2.
Data collection
These figures were produced using a combination of An Garda Síochána and Prison records. Since there is no direct link between the two systems, a statistical matching protocol was devised by the CSO to match Prison and Garda records. This protocol was updated in 2019 to capitalise on technological improvements that have become available in the 5 years since the report was first published. This revised matching process was applied to the 2011 and 2012 cohorts and will be applied to all subsequent cohorts until further notice.
Due to the absence of a unique identifier in the Irish Criminal Justice system, the matching process involves the comparison of individual records. In the region of 60% of all matches are matched automatically. That is, the name, address and date of birth details for the subject in the Prison dataset corresponds exactly with those details in the Garda PULSE dataset.
Due to data quality issues and limitations on the reliability of some information provided to law enforcement authorities, the remaining 40% of matches require manual examination. There are clear guidelines in place in relation to the selection or rejection of matches, but a certain level of subjectivity is inevitable in the absence of a unique identifier.
Crime recording
Incidents reported, or which become known to members of An Garda Síochána, are recorded when, on the balance of probability, a Garda determines that a criminal offence defined by law has taken place and there is no credible evidence to the contrary. If it is subsequently determined that a criminal incident did not take place, the record is invalidated and is not counted in the statistics. If a person makes a report and subsequently withdraws it, then this too is invalidated unless there is evidence to suggest that, by reasonable probability, the offence has taken place.
For criminal incidents where victim confirmation is required (e.g. assault, fraud), a criminal incident is recorded only where the victim confirms the incident or where there is evidence to suggest that by reasonable probability it occurred.
Crime Classification
A criminal incident is classified as a particular offence type at the initial recording of that incident. However, upon investigation, it may later become apparent that an alternative offence type should be used. In this event, the record is amended to reflect this. Re-classification based on court proceedings only occurs in relation to homicide offences. The classification is used in this publication is the ICCSq.
ICCSQ Offence Groups
|
01 |
Homicide offences |
Murder |
|
02 |
Sexual offences |
Rape of a male or female |
|
03 |
Attempts or threats to murder, assaults, harassments and related offences |
Murder – attempt |
|
04 |
Dangerous or negligent acts |
Dangerous driving causing serious bodily harm |
|
05 |
Kidnapping and related offences |
False imprisonment |
|
06 |
Robbery, extortion and hijacking offences |
Robbery of an establishment or institution |
|
07 |
Burglary and related offences |
Aggravated burglary |
|
08 |
Theft and related offences |
Theft/Unauthorised taking of a vehicle |
|
09 |
Fraud, deception and related offences |
Fraud, deception, false pretence offences |
|
10 |
Controlled drug offences |
Importation of drugs |
|
11 |
Weapons and explosives offences |
Causing an explosion |
|
12 |
Damage to property and to the environment |
Arson |
|
13 |
Public order and other social code offences |
Affray/Riot/Violent disorder |
|
14 |
Road and traffic offences (NEC) |
Driving licence-failure to have, produce etc. |
|
15 |
Offences against Government, justice procedures and organisation of crime |
Treason |
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