I have often been in debates on social media and in person with people who have differing perceptions of who actually ends up in our jails. Of course, there is always the debate about proportion of men to women, then there is the debate about proportions based on ethnicity and finally, the proportion based on the declared religion of the prisoner.
One must be cautious about of all such data. Namely because what is collected and how it is presented can often paint a varied picture. I have attempted to look at this based on data that is reasonably solid, and the metric used has a higher level of integrity.
Let me first give you one figure which is fact. The cost per prisoner is approximately £44000 per year. On average there are about 82000 prisoners in our jails and on average some 95% are men. You can do the mathematics of the cost to all of us of these criminals who have destroyed many lives and continue to be a burden on society.
One interesting topic of discussion was about the religion of prisoners. This can at the best of times be very controversial. The cancel culture that we live under now will want to hide the truth at any cost. Fortunately Kapil’s Khichadi does not care for the cowardice of the cancel culture. Below you see a table that shows the number and percentage of prisoners from different religious groups (or none) as recorded in 2020.
The table raises some important questions and unless we face them together as a nation, how can we even begin to address the underlying causes?
The headline that hits you is that there are 13, 563 Muslim prisoners in our jails. That represents 16% of the prisoner population. Whilst we await the Census 2021 data to come out, what we do know is that the Muslim population in the country is about 4%. Going by the figures alone, there are four times more Muslims in our jails than there are in the general population, and 98% of them are men.
The term Asian is often used to hide the truth. However, this data explodes the truth since when we compare the relative number we find that ONLY 352 Hindus are in our jails. That as a percentage is so small that it is officially recorded as 0%. Hindus make up about 2% of the general population, which means that Hindus in the UK are the most law abiding citizens. Yet in todays woke extremist culture, Hindus have become the target for racial abuse by not just a white racists, but also some prejudiced people from the BAME community.
The same graphic shows us that the Buddhist prisoners population is twice that of their number in the general population. I have to put my hands up and say, I have not quite managed to get to the bottom of why that should be the case.
There is significant overrepresentation in our prisons of Muslims, and of people from the Black community. Society, and in particular our politicians, have often run away from discussing these sensitive issues. People refuse to acknowledge the rampant rise of black-on-black crime. They don’t want to accept that Hindus, Sikhs and Jains are often the target of attacks by both white and black criminals who see them as soft targets.
In my view, I don’t care what colour you are, what religion or community you come from, if you break the law and commit crimes – then you do the time as well.
