It looks like the Ministry of Justice has a big problem on it’s hands. It doesn’t know why nearly a thousand inmates are even in prison.

Livejournal comments on my last post about sex ventured into the territory of prisoners and how reproductive rights work when there’s nobody about to reproduce with. I looked up prisoner numbers (PDF link to justice.gov.uk) to see how many of them served sentences long enough for this to be a problem and found a wonderful table detailing types of offence. The data is repeated in several places, but the best table is on page 9.

There are 935 prisoners currently in prison listed as “Offence not recorded”. This is separate from “Other offences”. 17 of those were children under 18 but over 14. This is of a total prison population of 71,103 in August 2010, of which 1,222 are children.

One individual who saw this today works for the prison service and his reaction was described as “baffled”. I’ll bet!