Vol. 572 No. 4
104 Mr. Sargent asked the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform the most recent figures of persons incarcerated in the State; the comparison to the previous year's figures; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [23442/03]
The total number of persons committed to prison in 2002 was 9,716. This is compared to 9,539 in 2001.
The number of persons aged under 18 years at time of committal in 2002 is not readily available and the extraction of the information would take considerable time and resources. However, I can inform the Deputy that the number of persons aged under 17 years committed to prison in 2002 was 155, of whom 26 were committed under sentence. The equivalent statistics for 2001 were 126 and 79, respectively. Further statistics of the prisoner population by age, gender, offence and sentence length are contained in the Irish Prison Service annual reports for 2001 and 2002, which are in the Oireachtas Library.
I refer the Deputy to my reply to Parliamentary Question No. 450 on 14 October 2003, which indicated that, according to the Council of Europe annual penal statistics survey 2002, the percentage of the Irish prisoner population under 18 years of age on 1 September 2002 at 1.5% was below that of a number of other European Union states.
