Are Small Boat Migrants Really 24x More Likely to Go to Prison?
Spoiler: No. But here’s how the media got suckered by bad data and worse assumptions.
The Conservatives have claimed migrants from small boats are “24 times more likely to end up in prison”, but this figure is wrong on so many levels!
On Thursday, I was sent this headline and asked if it was true…
It took a lot of digging to get to the bottom of it!
Alberto Brandolini wasn’t kidding when he said:
“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”
The claim
The Times were the first to report on this story, shortly followed by the Express, The Daily Mail, and The Telegraph, before it became a talking point on GB News and Talk TV. And the only source for the whole story was… the Conservative party.
There was no link to the analysis or any kind of report, just “Analysis by the Conservative Party”. From listening to the GB news interview, it would seem that Chris Philp, Shadow Home Secretary, might have been responsible.
The claim being that nationalities that are found in small boat crossings are massively over-represented in the UK prison population, and therefore those arriving on small boats will be 24 times more likely to end up in prison.
We’ll dig into why this analysis doesn’t hold up later on, but first, we’ll try and fathom the numbers used!
With no report to read and no sources given, I had my work cut out trying to establish where the numbers even came from, in order to work out if they were sensible.
The data
Eventually, I worked out that they used three sources of data:
The government’s Offender Management Statistics for March 2025, which breaks down the England and Wales prison population by nationality
The 2021 Census data on how many people held passports from different countries
The government’s immigration statistics on irregular arrivals (mainly small boat crossings)
