The number of foreign-born prisoners in Berlin is increasing according to new figures that show 90 different countries are now represented in the German capital’s prison system.
Convicted criminals without a German passport are now a majority in the German prison system at 51 percent of the total population and according to new data, 75 percent of prisoners in pre-trial detention are foreigners as well, Berliner Morgenpost reports.
While the total prison population in Berlin has dropped 18.5 percent within the last eight years, foreign-born prisoners have increased by 20 percent over the same period with there now being a total of 3,930 prisoners across Berlin in seven prisons and a detention centre.
Moabit prison accounts for the highest number of foreigner prisoners with a significant 73 percent of the total prison population while Heidering prison boasts 57 percent of its prisoners coming originally from overseas with Turks making up the single largest share of foreign-born prisoners.
The new figures follow a trend in other areas of the country such as Munich where it was reported last year that nearly half of the suspects in current investigations were foreigners. Among them, asylum seekers counted for around 10 percent of the total number of suspects despite being a much lower proportion of the population overall.
In neighbouring countries that have also been affected by the migration crisis, the number of foreign-born suspects has also risen in recent years. In Italy, which has, until recently, has seen a stream of migrants come from Africa across the Mediterranean, the number of foreign suspects is around one out of every three.
In Austria, the previous government revealed that in 2016 migrant sex assaults had increased by 133 percent and earlier this year in January the current conservative-populist government revealed that asylum seekers made up 45.9 percent of the criminal suspects with foreign backgrounds.
To increase transparency regarding the origins of sex attackers, the Austrian government proposed last month that police should indicate both the nationality of sex attackers and whether or not they were asylum seekers.