FOI/202600508732 · FOI · not held
Scottish prison population statistics: FOI release
Information requested
You asked for the number of foreign nationals detained in Scottish prisons / young offenders institutions for each financial year from (a) 1 April 2016 to 31 March 2025 and (b) 1 April to 31 December 2025 disaggregated by (i) nationality, (ii) whether convicted or held on remand, (iii) by prison / young offender institution and (iv) if convicted and sentenced whether that sentence had been completed.
Response
While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have some of the information you have requested.
The attached tables provide the count of individuals in financial years 2016-17 through 2024-25 who spent time in Scottish prisons disaggregated by:
nationality legal status prison establishment
This information is drawn from published data extracted using the SPPS Interactive Analysis Tool, published on the 18th November 2025 [https://scotland.shinyapps.io/sg-prison-population-tatistics/].
The Scottish Government does not hold this information for the period April-December 2025.
On part (iv) of your request, while the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) holds information on sentence length and the recorded type of liberation (for example, liberation recorded as “deportation”), they do not record whether deportation or removal occurred before or after sentence expiry, nor do they track post‑liberation outcomes. As a result, neither SPS nor Scottish Government hold information that answers the question of sentence completion.
About FOI
The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.