Remand Observatory

Access the observatory here. 

Professor Stan Gilmour (Oxon Advisory, University of Exeter) has developed PRISM-R, a tool which monitors racial disproportionality in remand, custodial sentencing, arrests, and stop and search both nationally and locally. 

Why monitor racial disproportionality in remand? 

Black and Mixed Heritage children are consistently over-represented among children remanded in the youth justice system, and much of this disparity is already visible before a child ever reaches court, in policing decisions like stop and search and arrest. PRISM-R follows children through this pathway and shows where disproportionality emerges and widens, drawing on publicly available data.

The tool is intended to assist TRYJustice in holding stakeholders to account over their plans to reduce the use of remand for children. The Youth Justice White Paper, published in May 2026, commits to cutting the number of children held in custodial remand by 25% over this government. PRISM-R tracks progress against that target, but it also asks a further question: is the reduction happening evenly across ethnic groups? A falling remand population that leaves racial disparities in place, whether in the make-up of the custody population, in remand rates, or in how long different groups spend on remand, would be a volume success but a fairness failure. 

This disparity in 'who benefits' from a numbers reduction was evident in the reduction of children in custodial settings. As described in the Lammy Review, figure 1, the reduction in the population of children in the secure estate largely constituted a reduction in the number of white children in the secure estate, whilst Black and Minority Ethnic groups of children are increasingly over-represented.

We are concerned with monitoring whether the same thing happens when the population of children in remand is reduced. 

On the site you can:

• See the national picture: how disparity develops across the four stages from stop and search through to custodial sentencing, and how each ethnic group's experience differs at each stage
• Track progress against the White Paper's 25% remand reduction target, alongside whether the ethnic composition of children remanded in custody is changing
• Explore your own area, to see how local police forces and youth justice services compare on these measures
• Read the full methodology, including publicly available data sources.