Incarceration Rates By Nationality In The UK

Following on from the government's spat with the ONS's population figures. I have decided to compare the number of foreign citizens from each country in the UK with the number of foreign citizens in prison in England & Wales.

Figures for for the incarceration and nationality are here, these refer to December 2006 so I'll use the 2006 population figures to compare them to.

Before I start I should note a few limitations of my comparison:

• The population figures are from the UK, whereas the prison figures are limited to England & Wales. This isn't a huge problem- except for the UK figure- because more than 90% of foreigners come to England & Wales
  
• I've made no allowance for the different age structures of the populations, older groups will have lower crime rates than younger ones.
• I've made no allowance for the sex ratio which will be different for each country. The low Filipino ranking is probably partly due to the fact that the most common reason for coming to the UK from there is to work in the, largely female, nursing profession.
  
• It only refers to adult prison, so youth crime isn't accounted for.
• Some countries are part of drug smuggling routes, as smugglers enter the country purely to commit a crime they are unrepresentative of their nation's citizens as a whole.
• Countries with whom we exchange prisoners will be under represented.
  
• The population figures only list the 60 most common nationalities in the UK. Some nationalities outside that top 60 would be at least in the top 10 if they were included, such as DR Congo, Serbia & Netherlands Antilles.
  
• There may be errors in the data. For example according to the prison stats there are no Ukrainian prisoners in England & Wales, which is obviously wrong. Others may also be suspect.

Having said all that it isn't a useless comparison as big differences will reflect something real regardless of all the provisos. So here is the list with the figures representing prisoners per 100,000 citizens of that country resident in the UK:

1. Vietnam-3320
2. Jamaica- 2674
3. Nigeria- 1516
4. Albania- 1064
5. Romania- 829
6. Sierra Leonne- 871
7. Trinidad & Tobago- 777
8. Iraq- 756
9. Iran- 754
10. Colombia- 712
11. Russia- 616
12. Uganda- 607
13. Somalia- 573
14. Turkey- 502
15. Cyprus- 500
16. Pakistan- 414
17. Ghana- 404
18. Lithuania- 366
19. Kenya- 353
20. China- 341
21. Sri Lanka- 322
22. Netherlands- 296
23. Latvia- 261
24. Zimbabwe- 252
25. Libya- 250
    
26. Belgium- 229
27. Bangladesh- 201
28. Portugal- 198
29. Ireland- 195
30. Brazil- 187
31. Czech- 185
32. Hungary- 183
33. South Africa- 165
34. Zambia- 160
35. Germany- 151
36. Spain- 149
37. France- 139
38. UK- 124
    
39. Austria- 120
40. Italy- 115
41. Poland- 113
42. India- 105
43. USA- 83
44. Malaysia- 69
45. Greece- 69
46. Bulgaria- 64
47. Hong Kong- 60
48. Canada- 58
49. Sweden- 55
50. Denmark- 53
51. Norway- 50
52. Slovakia- 48
53. Philippines- 34
54. Korea- 33
55. Switzerland- 33
56. Australia- 28
57. Honduras- 21
58. New Zealand- 17
59. Finland- 14
60. Japan- 0
61. Ukraine- 0

The overall trends are harder to see, citizens from rich countries tend to be locked up less frequently than those from poor countries but there are major exceptions (India, Zambia, Bulgaria). The largest source of immigrants in the last few years- Poland- has a fairly low incarceration rate. Recently war torn countries seem to have fairly high rates.