Ministry of Justice

Population in custody

Monthly statistical release presenting tables on the population in custody with summary figures on the population in prison establishments, police cells, secure children's homes and secure training centres.


The publication also contains more detailed information on the make-up of the prison population by custody type, offence group, sentence length, age group and establishment. On a quarterly basis information on the population of foreign nationals within prison, by establishment and nationality, is also included.

Update on the bulletin

Further to the notice on the postponement of the statistics for July 2009, we confirmed that we would not publish the end of August data on 30 September 2009.

Headline weekly management information using a manual workaround is still available and details of the overall prison population can be found on the Prison Service website.

In line with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics, we announced the timetable for resuming publication on 9 October 2009.

Limited population in custody data for Table 1 and Table 3 in its entirety (also Table 5 in full each quarter) will be provided in the prison population monthly bulletin on the Prison Service website starting with the October 2009 edition. This is an interim measure pending the resumption of full publication scheduled to start with the March 2010 data.

June 2009

May 2009

April 2009

March 2009

February 2009

January 2009

The bulletin is produced and handled by the ministry's analytical professionals and production staff. Pre-release access of up to 24 hours is granted to the following persons:

Ministry of Justice: Chief and Senior Press Officers from Newsdesk, Chief Press Officer on NOMS desk, Senior Press Officer and Press Officer from Prisons desk.