Prison population increases in 2023, more foreigners in jail | Yle News

The proportion of foreign prisoners rose to 18%.

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The number of inmates in Finnish prisons increased for the second consecutive year in 2023, the Finnish Prison and Probation Service (Rise) said on Tuesday.

In May, the agency warn The country’s prisons are overcrowded.

Convictions for robbery and sexual offences are increasing. The latter is partly due to tougher sexual offences laws that came into effect in 2023.

Last year, the average daily prisoner population was 3,143, about 90 more than a year ago. There were nearly 6,500 inmates in prisons nationwide last year, nearly 500 more than in 2022, the agency said in its statistical yearbook.

The largest increase was seen in the number of people imprisoned for failing to pay a criminal fine, known as defaulters. There were around 2,350 such prisoners, nearly a quarter more than in 2022. If a person is imprisoned for failing to pay a fine, each day of imprisonment is usually equivalent to a fine of €30. Defaulters can be sentenced to between four and 60 days in prison.

The number of foreign prisoners has increased since the COVID-19 pandemic

Nearly 40 percent of prisoners released last year had served less than three months. The average sentence was 11 months, slightly shorter than the year before.

The proportion of first-time offenders has risen from 37% to 43% over the past decade. The proportion of foreigners among prisoners has also increased. Foreign citizens account for 18%, up from 16% in 2022.

That year, the number of foreign prisoners increased by about 10% due to the lifting of travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prisoners under 21 years old make up 3.5% of the prison population.

More than a third of those sentenced to prison were for violent crimes

The largest group of prisoners (34%) are incarcerated primarily for violent crimes, including 21% who have been convicted of murder. The share of prisoners convicted of a violent crime has fallen 7 percentage points over the past decade, from 37% in 2009 to 37% in 2012.

About one in five inmates were incarcerated primarily for drug offenses, 12 percent for robbery and 8 percent for sex offenses. About 40 percent of foreign inmates were incarcerated for drug offenses, down from nearly half the year before, the agency said.