Erfurt (dpa/th) - There are fewer prisoners in Thuringian prisons. At the end of March, 1,118 prisoners and persons in preventive detention were detained in the Free State, as the State Statistical Office announced on Wednesday. That was 62 prisoners or 5.3 percent fewer than on the reference date of the previous year.
Almost four-fifths of the prisoners were reported to have had a criminal record. Around 78 percent of them had already been imprisoned for at least one prison sentence or youth sentence in the past - 112 inmates even eleven times or more.
The prisoners in the five prisons in the Free State were most often held for theft and embezzlement as well as for bodily harm offences. According to the statistics, 37 inmates served their sentences for murder. With 128 inmates, the number of prisoners under the age of 25 fell by 17.4 percent compared to the previous year. As of the reporting date, the proportion of foreign prisoners was 15.9 percent. That was 2.1 percentage points more than in the previous year.
