Immigrant Shares of the Prison Population Across 20 OECD Countries

Alex NowrastehIt ’s important to understand how immigrants affect crime in their new countries. However, crime data across countries are hard to come by and even harder to compare as laws vary significantly between jurisdictions, different countries have radically different criminal justice systems, and many count ries don’t systematically publish incarceration data that identify the foreign‐​born population.Fortunately, a wonderful new book entitledDoes Immigration Increase Crime?By Francesco Fasani, Giovanni Mastrobuoni, Emily G. Owens, and Paolo Pinotti includes a figure that helps tremendously. Figure 1 below is an updated version of their figure 1.7 on page 18 of theirbook. It shows the foreign ‐​born share of the population across 20 OECD countries compared to the foreign‐​born share of the prison populations in those countries. The prisoner data come from theCentre for Prison Studies and the population data from theOECD. Figure 1 uses the most updated data for both with no other controls.Figure 1 shows a wide range in foreign ‐​born shares of the incarcerated population and shares of the total population. In 13 of the 20 OECD countries listed, the foreign‐​born share of prisoners is higher than their share of the population – often multiple‐​times higher. This is evidence that the foreign‐​born populati on of those countries has a disproportionately higher crime rate. In seven OECD countries, the fore...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs