Romanians EIGHT times as likely to be jailed here as Britons: Shock new figures show they are worst offenders with 11,000 arrested each year... as foreign nationals fill 1 in 8 UK prison places

That proportion has doubled in the past ten years, corresponding with the mass influx of immigration from Eastern Europe.

But a more detailed breakdown by nationality of all inmates shows that Romanians, Albanians and Lithuanians are all proportionately far more likely to be imprisoned than Britons.

The figures reveal that the Romanians’ speciality is shoplifting in organised gangs, leading to suspicions that the much-vaunted EU principle of freedom of movement is being abused by criminals.

Tory MP Philip Davies, who obtained the figures, called them ‘staggering and unacceptable’.

The tables, which cover prisoners jailed between October 2013 and March 2014, represent the most comprehensive breakdown of inmates’ countries of origin.

They also reveal marked differences in the likelihood of different nationalities to be jailed, when adjusted for the number of those nationals living in Britain.

Whereas Poland, which has the largest population of 617,000 in the UK, ranks high in the table, with 573 prisoners imprisoned, it comes second to Romania, which saw 760 of its 126,000 population incarcerated.

It means Romanians are more than six times as likely as Poles to end up in jail, and eight times as likely as Britons. 

The bulk of those jailed – 34,168 out of 39,773 – are Britons and only a tiny minority of foreign nationals fall foul of the law.

Overall, the most likely foreigners to be imprisoned were Vietnamese and Albanians – with more than one per cent of their respective populations in Britain (10,000 and 11,000) jailed in that time. 

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