The number of foreign people in jail in the Republic of Ireland is about half the European average, with the Council of Europe classifying Irish rates as “low”.
Figures collected from European prison services last year show just more than 14 per cent of the prison population in the Republic was foreign.
The rate at which foreign people were jailed in the Republic was classified by the Council of Europe as “low” compared with other European countries where, on average, 27 per cent of prison populations were comprised of people foreign to those countries.
In Luxembourg and Switzerland, for example, some 78 per cent and 71 per cent of the prison population was made up of foreign people. It was lowest in Poland and Albania, at 2.6 per cent and 2.8 per cent.
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The European trends, and how the Irish prison system rates among them, are contained in the new Council of Europe annual report on penal statistics across the region for 2023.
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The last census indicated 22 per cent of the wider population of the Republic being foreign born. The Council of Europe report defines “foreign” prisoners as those who “do not have the citizenship of the country in which they are incarcerated”. However, this also includes “some who have a legal status of permanent residence in that country” as well as tourists, asylum seekers, those involved in transnational crime and others transiting through a country or work in a country briefly.
Prof Marcelo Aebi, who led the research team at the University of Lausanne that compiled the data, said the overcrowding issue in European jails was a key concern, especially as the prison population across the region had increased for the last two years after previously declining.
“This could still be a bounce-back effect from the reduction experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic years, due to the drop in offline crimes during the lockdowns [and] the release of prisoners in some countries,” he said.
In the Republic, just under 21 per cent of prisoners, of a 4,432 total, were in jail without a final sentence, mainly because they were on remand awaiting trial or pending a bail application. This was 4 per cent lower than the median across Europe.
Overcrowding in the Republic’s jails was also worse than many other prison systems in Europe. For example, at the end of January 2023, there were, on average, 99.4 prisoners for every 100 prison spaces in the Republic. This compared to 84.5 prisoners for every 100 places in Northern Ireland and the European median of 90.2 prisoners per 100 prison spaces.
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The incarceration rate in the Republic increased in 2022 and 2023 by 12 per cent, which was faster than most other countries in Europe.
The report concludes that in countries with 500,000 inhabitants or more, only five witnessed bigger growth in their incarceration rate in 2022 and 2023: Moldova, with a 52 per cent cent increase, North Macedonia, Cyprus, Turkey and Azerbaijan.
However, those trends were likely unevenly influenced across Europe by the pandemic and the different ways prisons and court systems were managed from 2020 and later returned to normal practices.
However, over the longer term – from 2005 to 2023 – the rate of incarceration in the Republic increased by 10.8 per cent, which was higher than most of our nearest neighbours, where fewer people per capita were jailed. In Northern Ireland, the rate of incarceration rose by 16.8 per cent; it remained level in Scotland and fell by 4.6 per cent in England and Wales.
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