Incarceration rates by nationality in England and Wales
A response to Rupert Lowe's request for data.
Written by Noah Carl.
Rupert Lowe, Member of Parliament for the Reform Party, recently posted on X about the need for “full nationality data on benefits, crimes, social housing and more”. Indeed, a common (and valid) criticism of the British government is that it publishes relatively few data on immigrants broken down by nationality or country of birth.
When it comes to crime, one thing we do have is the prison population by nationality, which is published each quarter by the Ministry of Justice. By itself, this isn’t very useful because it doesn’t tell us which groups have high crime rates. However, we can calculate rates by matching the figures with estimates of population by nationality.
The ideal source of population data is the 2021 census, given that it represents a full population sample. The census asks people whether they hold a foreign passport and, if so, for which country. However, the Office for National Statistics only breaks down the number of foreign passport holders into 52 different categories, meaning the data cannot be used to compare nationalities. For example, the only Middle Eastern countries with their own categories are Iran and Iraq; the rest are grouped into “Other Middle East”.
The census also asks people where they were born. And the number of people born outside the UK is broken down into individual countries of origin. However, nationality and country of birth are not the same thing, since many people born outside the UK are British nationals.1 Hence these data are not appropriate for calculating incarceration rates for different nationalities. (The Ministry of Justice does not publish the prison population by country of birth.)
Fortunately, the ONS publishes separate estimates of population by nationality, based on the Annual Population Survey. However, these estimates were discontinued in June 2021, meaning the latest month for which we have estimates is June 2021. To calculate incarceration rates, I matched these estimates with figures on the prison population in the following year.2 A one-year lag was used to account for the delay between arrest and sentencing. All data are for England and Wales.
It should be noted that the population estimates come with considerable uncertainty. Indeed, the 95% confidence interval can be greater than the actual estimate. For example, the estimate for Armenians in England is 1,000 with a 95% confidence interval of +/– 2000. So there could be as few as zero Armenians and there could be as many as 3,000. Unsurprisingly, the uncertainty is greatest for nationalities with small populations; it is much lower for those with large populations. The estimate for Australians in England is 81,000 with a 95% confidence interval of +/– 17,000. In short, the incarceration rates are not estimated precisely, and this is particularly true for nationalities with small populations.
The incarceration rates (per 1,000 people) are given here. Notice that Western and Northeast Asian nationalities are concentrated in the bottom half of the list. The top 10 nationalities are:
Albania (70.3)
Vietnam (23.6)
Somalia (17.1)
Barbados (11.5)
Angola (11.5)
Afghanistan (11.5)
Iraq (10.6)
Gambia (9.4)
Serbia (9.3)
Jamaica (9.0)
The distribution is highly skewed, with a mean of 3.1 and median of 1.3. The rate for British nationals is 1.3.
As you can see, most nationalities have rates less than 3. However, a small number have much higher rates. The three data points on the right-hand side correspond to Somalia, Vietnam and Albania. (The 95% confidence interval around the population estimate for Albania implies that the true incarceration rate could be as low as 49 or as high as 121.)
Overall, non-British nationals are slightly overrepresented in prison. They comprise 9.3% of the general population but 12% of the prison population. Why are they not more overrepresented given the very high incarceration rates of the nationalities listed above? The reason is that nationalities with high incarceration rates account for a small fraction of the non-British population.
As you can see, none of the nationalities with a high incarceration rate has a large population, while none of the nationalities with a large population has a high incarceration rate.
It isn’t particularly surprising that non-British nationals are only slightly overrepresented in prison. They’re nearly all first-generation immigrants, and first-generation immigrants typically have lower crime rates than second-generation immigrants.3 One reason is that first-generation immigrants often arrive after their peak crime years. Another is that some haven’t been in the country very long, and it takes time not only to commit a crime but also to be arrested, prosecuted and sentenced.
The data suggest that non-British nationals commit crime at slightly higher rates than British nationals, and that specific nationalities commit crime at much higher rates.
The original version of this article used prison population data from 2021, rather than 2022.
Noah Carl is Editor at Aporia.
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In 2021, there were 6 million people with non-British nationality living in the UK versus 9.6 million people who were born abroad.
Because figures on the prison population are given by actual nationality (i.e., “British”, “Irish”, “French”), whereas the population estimates are given by country of nationality (i.e., “UK”, “Ireland”, “France”), I used a country-to-nationality lookup table. Some manual recoding was also necessary. “Congolese” was given as a separate category in the prison population data, along with “Congolese (Congo, Democratic Republic)” and “Congolese (Congo, Republic of)”. Of the 11 “Congolese” prisoners, I assigned 8 to the Democratic Republic of Congo and 3 to the Republic of Congo, reflecting the relative sizes of their UK populations. “Serb or Croat” was also given as a separate category. Since there were only 3 such prisoners, I assigned 1.5 to Serbia and 1.5 to Croatia.
Most second-generation immigrants are British nationals.
Great post. You must have a lot of patience to work all that out from such disjointed statistics.
Assuming the figures are more or less right, a sensible government would stop immigration from those top ten countries tomorrow. But, of course, our governments haven't been sensible for some years.
Interesting analysis. However i don't think this statement is true "The ideal source of population data is the 2021 census, given that it represents a full population sample." - I know plenty of people who didn't fill it in. Look at each time there is some incident in an illegal HMO in Tower Hamlets and they find 14 people living in a 2 bed flat. Large percentage of illegal sublets also. None of those people will have done it. I recon for the most relevant populations their care for the legal consequences of failing to file the census is limited.