50% of prisoners in Catalonia are foreigners
Only 18% of the Catalan population is foreign, but they represent 50% of the prison population. Catalonia is the European leader in foreign prisoners according to the official report of the Council of Europe.
The SPACE I 2024 report, prepared by the Council of Europe and published in March 2025 with data corresponding to January 1, 2024, places Catalonia as the region with the highest proportion of foreign prisoners in all of Europe. According to the data collected, 50.1% of inmates in Catalan prisons are of non-Spanish nationality, a percentage that far exceeds the Spanish average (31.2 %) and the European average, which is between 25 % and 27 %.
Alarming data among foreigners in prisons
The prison population in Catalonia at the beginning of 2024 was 8,042 inmates, according to data from the Department of Justice of the Generalitat. Of these, 4,048 had foreign nationality, while 3,994 were Spanish.. This proportion has remained stable in recent years, despite variations in migratory flows and security and justice policies. In addition, the SPACE document details that the prison occupancy rate in Catalonia is 100 inmates per 100,000 inhabitants, a figure slightly lower than the Spanish average (121) and also below that registered in countries such as the United Kingdom (145 in England and Wales, 142 in Scotland) or France (107).
According to official data from Idescat, The foreign population resident in Catalonia on January 1, 2024 was 1,444,192 people, which represents 18.02% of the total Catalan population (8,012,231 inhabitants).. This implies that, despite representing less than a fifth of the population, foreign citizens are half of the inmates in the Catalan prison system. This disproportion between demographic weight and prison presence is objectively significant and It is not reproduced with the same intensity in any other autonomous community of the Spanish State or in any other European prison system analyzed by the Council of Europe report..
The 36% of the prisoners are Moroccans
Regarding the origin of foreign prisoners, according to data from the Department of Justice, most come from North Africa, especially Morocco, as well as from Latin America and, to a lesser extent, from countries in the European Union. Internal data from the Catalan prison system indicate that nearly 36% of the foreigners imprisoned are Moroccans, and which represent approximately 19% of the total inmate population. However, no individual nationality alone exceeds 20% of the total inmate population.
No data on nationals or ethnic origin
One of the most relevant points in the case of Catalonia is that many of the prisoners registered as “Spanish” could be of foreign origin, a fact that is not reflected in official statistics. The Catalan authorities do not collect information on the ethnic or family origin of citizens with Spanish nationality. This implies that the real proportion of people of foreign origin in prisons could be even higher than indicated by figures based exclusively on nationality. The same situation occurs throughout Europe where there is data such as the one that says that Algerian youth in Germany commit 56 more crimes than German youth but they do not take into account those who already have the nationality.
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