Seventy-Two Percent of Swiss Prisoners Are Foreign Nationals. Here's What That Number Actually Means

Seventy-two percent of prisoners in Switzerland are foreign nationals. It is a striking statistic, and it is accurate. But taken on its own, it explains almost nothing.

The overrepresentation of foreigners in crime statistics is a universal phenomenon, observed in many countries worldwide. Yet delinquency cannot be explained by nationality alone, isolated from legal, socio-economic, and demographic factors. In Switzerland, several structural reasons help explain why 72 percent of prisoners are foreign nationals — and most of them have little to do with criminality.

The first is that foreign detainees cannot serve their sentences outside prison. "Foreigners often don't have a fixed residence in Switzerland and therefore cannot benefit from electronic bracelets or house arrest, nor from community service as an alternative form of punishment," explains André Kuhn, professor of criminal law at the University of Neuchâtel. "There is a certain discrimination built into the law itself."

Foreigners are also overrepresented in pre-trial detention. "They are more often detained before trial than Swiss nationals, because of fears they may flee," Kuhn says. People in pre-trial detention are presumed innocent until trial, but in practice they are incarcerated. On January 31, 2025, of 6,994 people in detention, 2,211 were in pre-trial detention and 1,199 were in so-called "early execution of sentences and measures." Among those in pre-trial detention, 79 percent were foreign nationals — the highest number since records began in 1988. This inflates the statistical overrepresentation of foreigners who are, legally speaking, still presumed innocent, while Swiss nationals can usually remain free while awaiting verdicts.

Kuhn cites two further explanations. "There are offences that can only be committed by foreigners." This includes, for example, the 220 people detained under coercive measures according to the Federal Act on Foreign Nationals and Integration — mostly rejected asylum-seekers awaiting deportation. Foreigners who face expulsion at the end of their sentence are also excluded from conditional release. "Foreign nationals remain in prison longer than Swiss ones," Kuhn says.

Demographics play a role too. In Switzerland, young men are overrepresented among foreign residents. Globally, men and young people are the most crime-prone categories. Because of higher birth rates and predominantly male migration, the foreign population contains a larger share of young men — which helps explain their overrepresentation in prisons.

Socio-economic inequalities can also make foreigners more vulnerable to certain forms of crime, such as petty theft. Foreign populations are more present in modest or lower-middle social classes — groups that generate about 60 percent of crime. Certain offences, such as theft or street-level drug dealing, are also punished more harshly than white-collar or financial crimes. One NGO even describes Switzerland as a "paradise for economic crime."

Education is another determinant. While only about half of the Swiss population has a modest level of education, in 2013 this applied to 68 percent of people in detention. Finally, racist biases in policing and judicial institutions may aggravate the problem. A federal report published in August criticised the lack of adequate measures against structural racism in justice and law enforcement, with a national strategy expected in 2026.

So what role does nationality really play? In criminology, explanatory factors interact, reinforce, or cancel each other out. Kuhn stresses the importance of weighing the respective impact of each variable. Models show that the main predictors of crime are sex, age, socio-economic status, and education level. Nationality rarely adds explanatory value. "Nationality generally explains none of the additional variance in crime," Kuhn says. In rare cases, it may be a fifth factor — behind sex, age, socio-economic status, and education — when migration comes from a country at war. Exposure to violence in a war-torn society can have a "brutalisation" effect, lowering inhibitions and increasing violent behaviour. This can also occur in host countries exposed to police violence, militarised border protection, the death penalty, or widespread gun culture.

That is why, Kuhn concludes, particular care must be taken of war refugees — as exemplified by the outpatient service for victims of torture and war run by the Swiss Red Cross.

For now, the number is real. But numbers do not explain themselves. They require context — and context is exactly what a single statistic can never provide.

Written by Andreas Hofer andreas.hofer@alpineweekly.com