Are 72% of prison inmates in Switzerland foreign?

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Hello, and thanks for downloading the More or Less podcast.

With a program that looks at the numbers in the news and in life and in Swiss prisons.

I'm Tim Harford.

Loyal listener George got in touch to ask us to look into some of the figures Donald Trump used in a recent speech at the UN.

Here's the section in question.

According to the Council of Europe in 2024, almost 50% of inmates in German prisons were foreign nationals or migrants.

In Austria the number was 53% of the people in prisons were from places that weren't from where they are now.

In Greece the number was 54% and in Switzerland, beautiful Switzerland, 72% of the people in prisons are from outside of Switzerland.

When your prisons are filled with so-called asylum seekers who repaint kindness.

50%?

53%?

72%?

Those numbers sound rather high.

Can they really be right?

Yeah, the numbers are right.

Enter Marcelo Aiebe.

He is thoroughly qualified to answer this question.

He's a professor of criminology.

He works at the University of Lausanne and lives in Switzerland.

And he's the lead author of the Council of Europe report on prison populations that President Trump was citing.

I mean, he cherry-picked the highest ones, of course.

He could have used numbers from Eastern Europe, and there the issue of foreigners doesn't exist.

So he chose the highest numbers that were there.

Well, I mean, that just seems to be pretty standard.

behavior from politicians.

So 72% of people in prisons in Switzerland are from outside of Switzerland.

That's true.

That's true.

So, what is going on in Switzerland?

The first answer, if I tried to organize, would be it's complicated, but I would say a part of it is artificial and a part reflects a real problem.

The first thing to understand is geography.

Switzerland is at the crossroads of Europe.

Millions of people cross the border every year.

And every day we have 400,000 cross-border workers, people that have a permit to work in Switzerland but not to leave.

So you have a lot of people entering every day.

Among them, you can find, for example, gangs specialize in robberies or in burglaries.

It's a very small country, so you enter, you cross, and you go out, and it's a rich country.

So it attracts also some, I would say, non-wanted tourists.

Next, you've got demographics.

Switzerland is already a multicultural society.

27% of the stable population are foreigners and roughly 30% are foreign-born.

In Geneva and Lausanne, the percentage of foreigners legally established is close to half of the population in big cities, you know.

So, of course, then the percentage of foreigners would be higher than in other countries.

People tend to forget that among this percentage of foreigners, a good part of them are are EU citizens.

Donald Trump says the foreign prisoners are so-called asylum seekers.

But there are all kinds of people who aren't Swiss nationals in this statistic.

The figures are based on citizenship, not immigration status.

This is a general category where you have long-term immigrants together with tourists, commuters, asylum seekers, and undocumented people.

However, while we don't know the exact immigration status from the prison stats, Marcelo says you do get an idea from Swiss conviction data.

There, you can make the difference between the persons with the legal status of residence and the persons without that legal status.

So, when you take this into account, the percentage of those with the legal status of resident is roughly 30% of the people sentenced.

So, it's more or less the same as their part in the population.

And the part of Swiss citizens is small, but the main difference comes from those who do not have a legal status.

People who've come to Switzerland to claim asylum might be counted in that group, but so would those crime tourists Marcelo mentioned earlier.

And this group, people who are neither Swiss citizens nor legally resident foreign nationals, are important in this figure because they're far more likely to be held in prison before trial.

Switzerland has a high share of people in remand waiting for a final sentence, about 46%.

And foreigners are disproportionately represented there because without the Swiss address, they are less likely to be released pending trial.

One more bit of context.

Relative to its population, Switzerland has a tiny number of people in prison.

Switzerland is a country with a

low-crime country and also a country where sentences are usually relatively, I would not say lenient, but they are much shorter than in other countries.

So that explains also why the absolute number of inmates in Switzerland is low.

Switzerland has a prison population of under 7,000, or 77 prisoners per 100,000 people in the population.

That compares to 145 per 100,000 in England and Wales, and over 500 per 100,000 in the US, where the total incarcerated population is around 1.8 million people.

President Trump implied that Switzerland was swamped with asylum-seeking criminals.

There certainly are asylum-seekers in Swiss prisons, although we don't know how many.

The 72% figure is high because of policies on pre-trial detention.

and because open borders to the EU mean that people can pop into Switzerland briefly with the aim of causing trouble.

It's also a large slice of a small prison population.

But all that said, 72% is a big number and it suggests a real problem.

I mean yeah there is a problem.

Not the problem it would seem when you look at the figures but there is a problem.

As to how you solve that problem, the question's a tricky one.

Switzerland's economy relies on people commuting in from neighbouring countries such as France to work in shops, factories, offices and hospitals.

Checking every passport on the way through would cause chaos.

But that means criminals can simply drive across the border for a day of doing crimes and then drive home again.

There is no easy solution.

I wish I would have the magic solution and I can assure you that even policymakers here are trying to find the solution because it's a problem that has been there for a long time, but it's not easily solved because it doesn't come from immigration, it comes from the persons who are not established here and you cannot introduce very heavy border controls because we are in the middle of Europe and everything needs to move.

For comparison the rate of foreign nationals in prison in England and Wales is 12%.

For the US the rate is just under 7%.

How about those other countries mentioned by Donald Trump?

Germany, Austria and Greece?

Again, the numbers are correct.

For Germany and Austria, with around 50% of foreign prisoners, Marcelo says some of the drivers are similar to those in Switzerland.

These countries attract a lot because they are much more similar to Switzerland than others.

Also, the borders, I mean, the borders exist, but these are very big borders.

You cannot check everything.

And so they attract a lot of people.

So again, many of these prisoners will be EU citizens and some of them will be crime tourists.

For Greece, with 54% foreign prisoners, the situation is different.

Greece is in the front line of illegal immigration, you know.

There is an organized crime circuit there to bring people from other countries.

This is trafficking in human beings.

It's also for illegal work, for different things.

So if you are in the front line of all these people arriving, at one moment you will have an over-representation.

Our thanks to Marcelo Aiebi.

And that's it for this episode of More Orless.

But if you've seen a number you want us to take a look at, please email us at more or less at bbc.co.uk.

We will be back next week.

And until then, goodbye.

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