Frp: Historical short detention queue

Jail.Photo: Gorm Kallestad / NTB scanpix

Fresh figures from the Ministry of Justice show that 157 people are waiting to serve time. The number is historically low, according to the Progress Party.

“In practice, we have no waiting time to talk of anymore. It has as good as disappeared, “said Frp representative Himanshu Gulati in the parliamentary committee of justice to NTB.

The same wording was used by Frp leader Siv Jensen in October last year when the prison queue decreased to 328 people. The queue shrank further until December last year, when 242 were waiting.

In response to Gulati’s written questions about the waiting times, Justice Minister Per-Willy Amundsen (Frp) stated that reporting varies over time. Before the summer of this year the queue had increased to 405 people.

Variations
Also during the red-green administration, the sentencing varied from year to year. Before the Stoltenberg government took over, in June 2005 there were 2,579 people in the detention queue. In October 2009 the queue had shrunk to 250. At the change of government in October 2013, 1,213 waited to serve detention.

Despite the variations over time, Gulati believes that the government’s hiring of prison places in the Netherlands explains why the prison queue is currently shorter than it has been before.

More serving sentences
On Tuesday, Statistics Norway  presented figures for detention and prison sentences in 2015. It appears that more  went to jail last year than in 2014, either by electronic tagging or into prisons.

At the start of 2015, according to Statistics Norway, 4,056 were inmates in Norwegian prisons. The figures are an indicator of who is imprisoned in Norway at all times.

Of the detainees, 65 percent were sentenced to prison sentences. In addition, 5.5 per cent were sentenced to imprisonment by electronic tagging, 2 per cent were  in secure accomodation, and 1.5 per cent given fines.

The remaining 26 per cent prisoners were in custody pending a court decision.

Although at the beginning of 2014 there were 4,103 inmates in Norway, against 4,056 inmates per 1 January 2015, both the use of electronic tagging and detention in prison increased in 2015.

©  NTB Scanpix / Norway Today

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