The Department of Justice and Home Affairs cannot provide figures on reoffending among people given suspended prison sentences in the last five years.
Arbory, Castletown and Malew MHK Jason Moorhouse asked how many offenders who received a suspended sentence later committed an offence carrying a custodial term, and how many were not subsequently sent to prison.
Justice and Home Affairs Minister Jane Poole‑Wilson said the courts’ case‑management systems do not allow searches by sentence type, meaning suspended‑sentence cases cannot be identified without manually reviewing individual records.
She added that while some information may exist within Prison and Probation Service systems, further investigation was needed and could not be completed in time.
Compiling the data would require manual checks across multiple systems over a five‑year period, she said, and the Department is therefore unable to provide the statistics requested.
