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.
