PRISM-R
Prevention Risk Intelligence & Stratified Mapping: Remand
An open analysis of youth remand disproportionality in England and Wales
PRISM-R examines the over-representation of Black, Mixed Heritage and minority-ethnic children among those remanded in the youth justice system of England and Wales. It treats that over-representation as a prevention question: a pattern that is set well before a child reaches a courtroom, and that is visible in earlier decisions, in policing and in the circumstances children grow up in.
The tool follows children through the decisions that lead to remand and shows where disparity enters and where it compounds. It reports co-occurrence, not causation, and it draws only on publicly available data.
The headline picture
- 28%
- Black children as a share of children remanded
- 18%
- Mixed Heritage children as a share of children remanded
- 16%
- Asian children and children in the Other category, as a share of children remanded
- 62%
- Remanded children who did not receive a custodial sentence
Published statistics, cited as reported in Youth Justice Statistics 2024 to 2025, Ministry of Justice and Youth Justice Board, January 2026. The charts on the national picture page are PRISM-R's own analysis and are labelled as such.
Tracking the 25% target
The Youth Justice White Paper Cutting Youth Crime. Changing Young Lives., published on 18 May 2026, commits to reducing custodial remand for children by 25% over this Parliament. The chart shows the youth estate remand population as a 12-month rolling average, monthly from 2015, against the baseline (the twelve months to March 2025) and the 25% target line. The faint line is the unaveraged monthly figure.
Download this chart's data (CSV)
As of June 2026 (provisional), the 12-month average remand population is 179, 17.1% below the March 2025 baseline.
The remand population was already falling before the White Paper: down 16.1% between March 2025 and May 2026.
Whole-custody ethnic composition
Download this chart's data (CSV)
Share of the whole custody population, monthly: Black and Mixed Heritage children. This is the whole custody population, not the remand population; the Youth Custody Service does not publish remand by ethnicity monthly. A volume reduction that leaves these shares, the remand-stage Relative Rate Index, or the ethnic gap in remand duration unchanged is a volume success and a fairness failure.
Sources: MoJ Youth Custody Service monthly youth custody report, June 2026 edition (latest month provisional); YJS 2024-25. Read the full metric definition.
Where to go next
- National picture The road-to-remand cascade, and what it reveals about where disparity is generated.
- Methods Every source, every methodological decision, the disclosure controls, and how to reproduce the pipeline.
- About What PRISM-R is for, who produces it, and its independence.
See worked example: Lambeth A preview of the local-level analysis the geographic explorer will provide.