The Contribution of Migrants to Crime in Russia: Evidence from Court Statistics

Abstract

This paper discusses two aspects of the migration and crime. First, it explores the crimes associated with internal and external migrants. The analysis shows that foreigners in Russia are more often charged with low gravity crimes such as “forgery of documents” and “illegal crossing of the border.” With regard to other types of crimes there are almost no difference between Russian citizens and foreigners. Second, the paper discusses the inequality between Russians and foreigners before criminal court which could be found from the analysis of the judicial statistics. Russian judges do indeed convict foreigners more often than citizens of Russian Federation. They also more often sentence foreigners to real imprisonment and more rarely choose suspended sentence. However, when it comes to the length of incarceration term, Russian judges tend to be more lenient to migrants than to Russians and systematically give them shorter prison terms than to Russian citizens. The study is based on the dataset of 1,5 million individual cases considered by Russian Courts in 2009-first half of 2010.