Prison population is no indicator of crime

Last Sunday, I read with some amazement an opinion column authored by Dr Carmelo Vassallo in this newspaper, under the headline ‘Why foreign criminals must be deported’.

Dr Vassallo is the Head of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Malta. As such, I assume he is familiar with the rigours of academic discipline that would be expected from this kind of exercise. 

But onto the article itself: Vassallo starts out by conducting what he terms an “impromptu study” (not exactly the most reassuring choice of adjectives there, but anyway) of “the characteristics of individuals being brought up before our courts.” To this end, he limited himself “to a quick review of Matthew Agius’s MaltaToday court reports for the four preceding weeks”.

His impression, we are told, “was that a good number of the reports involved individuals bearing names commonly associated with a Muslim cultural/religious background…”

Hmm. Already – and we’re still in the second paragraph – a couple of small anomalies swim into view. What, for instance, is a ‘good number’? A number one happens to like? A number that is convenient for one’s argument? How about an actual percentage, which (let’s face it) would have been easy to supply, and also more academically precise?

Even so, however: what would this percentage actually reflect? “Being brought up before our courts” is not the same thing as “being tried and found guilty of a crime by a court of law”. And in case Dr Vassallo is unaware of this fact, our judicial system is actually rooted in the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’.

This also means that his ‘impromptu study’ concerned only a sector of the population that, from a legal perspective, must perforce be ‘presumed innocent’. How on earth, then, can the same statistic also double up as ‘proof’ that this sector is guilty of more crimes (as Vassallo goes on to suggest)?

The anomaly becomes harder to ignore when you also consider that Vassallo’s primary source was the court reports of a single newspaper. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to consult the actual judgments handed down by the Criminal Courts, which are published each day on the Justice Ministry’s website? This way, he would not have ‘limited himself’ only to what a single court reporter was able to cover in the limited time available to him. And instead of only dealing with trials at arraignment stage, he would have had the benefit of cases that had actually been decided.

I tried that exercise out for myself – you can all do the same: this is the website http://www.justiceservices.gov.mt/courtservices/Judgements/ – and I found that the overwhelming majority of judgments handed down by the Criminal Court over the last 15 days concerned recognisably Maltese surnames. Hardly any foreigners at all…

I’ll concede, however, that I haven’t had time to check what percentage of these judgments reached a guilty verdict. Perhaps Dr Vassallo might find the time to conduct this ‘impromptu study’, too.

On his own part, Dr Vassallo likewise concedes that his was “just a superficial impression”, which needed closer analysis. Regrettably, however, it is from here on that real problems begin.

He notes, for instance, that Malta’s prison population stood at 569 at the end of 2015; and that – as of August 2015 – 40.2% of those 569 were ‘foreigners’. He then points out (rather irrelevantly) that “at a time when foreigners constituted 30.2% of the total prison population, North African offenders constituted 59% of all 1990s foreign prisoners, with 38% coming from the closest lands of Libya and Tunisia.”

You will note that this second set of statistics dates back to the 1990s. OK, it’s a little closer to our time than some of the other statistics he also provides – e.g., from the 1970s (!) – but… how does he justify yo-yo-ing between different decades, as if cherry-picking from the most congenial statistics to his argument?

In any case, we can all see what he is driving at: i.e., that there are more Muslims than any other denomination currently in Malta’s prisons. More, he later tells us, than “atheists, Catholics, Jews and Buddhists.”

Erm… yes, I would have guessed as much myself quite easily. There are, after all, considerably more Muslims in Malta than ‘atheists, Jews, and Buddhists’ (though not, obviously, Catholics… I’ll come to those later). 

Atheists, for instance, are a notoriously difficult category to quantify. There are a few groups on the island purporting to represent them – I helped set up one of them myself, in 2010 (The Malta Humanist Association). It currently has around 1,500 members. Obviously more people than that would call themselves ‘atheists’ in the entire country… but how many more? Very hard to say. 

It is highly unlikely to be a ‘good number’, however. Nowhere near the 30,000 Muslims currently estimated to reside in Malta.

Meanwhile: how many Buddhists are there? I happen to know one or two myself; and they’re not terribly representative of the broader population. I assume there will be a few more. But again, how many? 100? 200? 1,000…?

The number of Jews may be easier to determine, because there is a long-standing historic presence of that ethnicity here. Again, however, we are talking very small numbers… literally, a handful of families. 

Meanwhile: if 40% of the prison population is foreign, and that population stands at 569… that amounts to 225 foreign inmates. We don’t have precise figures for how many of them are Muslims: but Vassallo’s earlier statistics suggest it is probably around 60%. 

This, however, is at best a rather wild guess. There have been influxes of previously ‘rare’ nationalities since the 1990s. Last year, the police arrested an entire gang of housebreakers from places like Khazakhstan, for instance. There are generally more people from Eastern Europe in the country today than 20 years ago; and since 2004 (when we joined the EU) the contingents from other EU member states – especially Italy – have skyrocketed. How many of these categories are also in prison?

But I’m quite happy to stick to the estimate of 60% anyway. That would mean around 135 Muslims in jail right now... out of a total population of 30,000. 

That’s only 2.2%. Not exactly very impressive, now is it? To put it into perspective… if there are two Buddhists in prison, out of 200 in total, the statistic works out the same. 

Naturally, this humble percentage still works out at much higher than the corresponding statistic for Maltese inmates: which would be 344 as a percentage of 400,000. But this only points towards the much, much more serious flaw in Vassallo’s calculation.

The real problem with Vassallo’s analysis is that (in his own words) he takes “prison inmates as a proxy indicator” of crime. Wrong, wrong, wrong. This absurd argument overlooks the single most astonishing aspect of our entire judicial system: the percentage of inmates (nearly all foreigners) who are in prison AWAITING TRIAL.

The ‘US Department of State 2014 Country Report on Human Rights Practices in Malta’ indicated that 20% of the total prison population was in pre-trial detention at the end of last year. Of these, the overwhelming majority – nearly 100% – are foreigners. In fact, it is routine practice for the prosecution to always request bail to be denied in case of foreigners, because of the increased likelihood that they may abscond.

Ask any Maltese defence lawyer (especially on legal aid), and he/she will confirm that the overwhelming majority of these requests is automatically upheld when the foreign defendant is of North African/Muslim extraction. What does this mean? That the statistic cited by Carmelo Vassallo to ‘prove’ that Muslims commit more crimes, actually proves that Muslims are much likelier to be detained awaiting trial (i.e., at a time when they must legally be regarded as innocent until proven guilty).

The other thing that Vassallo overlooks is the duration of pre-trial detention, which (on average) is much, MUCH longer for foreigners than for Maltese. This is how it is explained in an article in the Independent: “…one of the contributing factors leading to this is the fact that police inspectors have a dual role in Malta: that of investigating and prosecuting – which could at times lead to delays before the trial or sentencing is heard, exceeding the stipulated pre-trial time-frame.” (July 2015)

So not only do more foreigners find themselves in prison than Maltese because they were denied bail… but they also spend much longer there, too. This also means the turnover for Maltese prisoners is higher. The number of foreigners in prison therefore appears to be much greater, for the simple reason that Maltese suspects tend to await their trials outside prison.

A cursory look at recent European Court of Human Rights rulings would also have confirmed this. From the same article: “In 2013, Malta was found to have breached the human rights of a Lithuanian who spent 22 months in prison without trial… It was also guilty of not bringing the accused to trial within a reasonable time or to release him pending trial…”

And again: “A more recent ruling was made on May 29, 2014 after a judge ruled in favour of two Somali men who had not received a fair hearing within a reasonable time.”

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of Dr Vassallo’s analysis is that he goes on to use these flawed statistics to perpetuate an impression (no doubt to the applause of many) that one denomination of ‘foreigner’ – the North African Muslim – is automatically likelier to be ‘criminal’ in nature than any other. I find that a profoundly disturbing, archaic and utterly indefensible view of criminology. It reminds me of Javert in Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables’: who pursues Valjean so relentlessly on the basis that he ‘must’ be a criminal (as he was born ‘of criminal stock’).

Certainly it is not the level of academic rigour I would have expected from a University lecturer conducting a study of such weighty implications. I’d humbly suggest he try again.