On a more sinister note, Ministry of Justice research published in 2016 purported to demonstrate an association between ethnicity and the likelihood of a prison sentence in the Crown Court. Under ‘similar criminal circumstances’, the odds of imprisonment for offenders self-reporting as black, Asian and Chinese or other were higher than for offenders from self-reported white backgrounds (53 per cent, 55 per cent and 81 per cent higher respectively).8 These statistics should be treated with caution, as the analysis suffered from significant limitations (particularly in its definition of ‘similar
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