Scotland’s chief statistician today published a bulletin on the presumption against short sentences (PASS), which was extended from July 2019 to cover sentences of 12 months or less.

The bulletin states that the number of custodial sentences of less than or equal to 12 months and the proportion of all disposals that these made up, “were reducing in the period between the implementation of the extended presumption and the announcement of lockdown in late March”.

However, the “suspension of court cases and the resulting backlog in court cases waiting to progress complicates the interpretation of recent patterns in custodial sentence lengths, making it difficult to separate the effects of the pandemic from the effects of the extended presumption against short custodial sentences,” it adds.

The bulletin therefore describes what has happened to court disposals (with a focus on custodial sentences of 12 months or less) in 2020 but does not attempt to attribute those results to events or policies.

It notes that the number of community payback orders (CPOs) fell sharply when lockdown commenced and “although they have almost recovered, it is too early to determine if the lower levels reported will change once the backlog of court cases is cleared”.

The number of restriction of liberty orders (RLO) issued increased steadily since lockdown eased and numbers were at a recent high of 188 in December 2020.