Immigrants and Muslims in European prisons

In Berlin and Hamburg more than 50% of prisoners are foreigners. With the recent influx of migrants the Muslim population of Germany now numbers around six million, or 7% of Germany's overall population of 82 million. By contrast, roughly 20% of the 65,000 inmates in the German prison system are Muslim, according to data collected from regional justice ministries. 

This is partly, of course, because there are many more Muslim young men suddenly.

In an article entitled, "German Becomes a Foreign Language in Many Prisons," the Berliner Morgenpost reported on the growing number of conflicts between German prison officers and foreign inmates because of a language barrier.

I learnt this from a piece published today by Soeren Kern of the Gatestone Institute (an American conservative body chaired by John Bolton) and it led me to doing some research on statistics for foreigners, immigrants or Muslims in Sweden, France and the UK.

The Washington Post and many other sources have said that 70% of the population of France’s prisons are Muslims, despite only 8-10% of the population being Muslim. This statistic is attributed to a book called Islam in Prisons by Farhad Khosrovkhavar, a Franco-iranian sociologist, but he says he never said it. He says that he reckons a true figure is ‘around half’, 40%-50%. The French government does not record these things.

Back in 2013 18,300 of French prisoners registered for Ramadan, out of a total prison population of 67,700, or 27%, back in 2013 according to Agence France Presse. Professor Khosrovkhavar suggests that this is an underestimate, because some Muslims fear being ‘noted’ by the intelligence services. 

A Brookings Institution report says that 

“Muslims are greatly over-represented in prisons and within the eighteen- to twenty-four–year-old age group in particular: they make up only 8.5 percent of that age cohort in France, yet 39.9 percent of all prisoners in the cohort.” 

Muslims represent only 4.7% of the UK population, but 15% of the prison population, which again is tied to their age and social class.

In 1991 Sweden stopped keeping statistics on immigrant crime in the comprehensive way that they had done. The last survey that was made, in 2005, found that immigrants were 2.5 times more likely to be registered as crime suspects than people born in Sweden, but 

"if one standardizes in order to take into account differences in relation to age, gender, level of education and income, the relative risk among those born outside Sweden diminishes to 2.1"

In 2006 90% of all robberies reported to the police in Malmo were committed by gangs and gangs in Malmo are, according to Fjordman, understood to be Muslim gangs. 

A report on immigrant-related crime in Sweden in 2006 by Ann-Christine Hjelm from Karlstads University found that 85% of those sentenced to at least two years in prison for rape in 2002 were foreign born or second-generation immigrants. The Swedes, it must be remembered, count many things as rape that other countries don't and have a very high rate of reporting rapes. 

I quoted last year Bojan Pancevski of the Wall St. Journal saying.

"There is data about the ethnic background of convicted rapists in Sweden. Over 58% of them were foreigners in the 2012-2017 period. This obviously does not include people of immigrant origin who are Swedish citizens. This trend goes back decades. Ethnic background of criminal offenders was last included in the annual government report about crime in 2005, when foreigners were vastly over-represented. After that the government stopped including ethnicity in the reports. But the data can still be gathered in different ways. The 58% is from court records."

The proportion of "assault rapes" committed by foreigners might be higher than 58%. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is much higher.

42 out of 43 of those convicted in Sweden for gang rape in 2016-2017 had foreign backgrounds, says Pelle Neroth Taylor, Anglo-Swedish journalist and director of Sweden Dying to be Multicultural. 32 were born abroad and 10 were born in Sweden of foreign parents. 

I met a Swedish prison office in a pub in Scotland last year and asked her how many of the prisoners in her prison (for criminals whose offences were drug-related) were non-white and she said about half.