PRISM-R: Remand Disparity Intelligence
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, from Youth Justice Statistics 2024 to 2025:
28%
Black children as a share of children remanded
Source: Youth Justice Statistics 2024 to 2025, Ministry of Justice and Youth Justice Board, January 2026
18%
Mixed Heritage children as a share of children remanded
Source: Youth Justice Statistics 2024 to 2025, Ministry of Justice and Youth Justice Board, January 2026
16%
Asian children and children in the Other category, as a share of children remanded
Source: Youth Justice Statistics 2024 to 2025, Ministry of Justice and Youth Justice Board, January 2026
62%
Remanded children who did not receive a custodial sentence
Source: Youth Justice Statistics 2024 to 2025, Ministry of Justice and Youth Justice Board, January 2026
These four figures are published statistics, cited as the Youth Justice Board and Ministry of Justice report them. The charts on the national picture page are PRISM-R's own analysis and are labelled as such.
Timely context
The Youth Justice White Paper, published on 18 May 2026, commits to reducing the number of children jailed awaiting trial. PRISM-R provides the open, reproducible evidence base against which that commitment can be tracked: the road-to-remand cascade by ethnicity, child-specific Relative Rate Indices derived from public data using the Ministry of Justice methodology, and full provenance for every figure. The values shown on this site reflect the year ending March 2025 and form the baseline against which future change will be measured. PRISM-R refreshes annually when the Youth Justice Statistics are published; child remand and the road-to-remand cascade will be tracked through each refresh.
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 coming in Sprint 3.