Penal Prison Statistics(Prisoners and persons in preventive custody with demographic and criminological characteristics)

At Länder level, statistics undergo automatic assessment routines. The data is made plausible with great effort internally and triangulated with external data. Potential irregularities are clarified by further inquiries on behalf of the Länder statistical offices with the administrative reporting units. Nevertheless, individual errors or incorrect indications cannot be ruled out. The quality of data is weaker for particular parts of the data which are not also used by prison administration for their internal purposes. For example, the no. of inmates without a permanent residence has been overestimated previously since the addresses of inmates where unknown to prison administration. Moreover, changes in the data collection catalogue can create a period of transition in which information on the new/changed characteristics are not collected completely and adequately. Errors might occur both at data collection stage as well as when exporting data from administrative programmes to statistical offices. Known errors are indicated in the respective publications. No systematic fallacies flaws are known of. There are no ongoing revisions of the statistics. Rather, in case of grave mistakes, a new compilation of the statistics is created. If the wrong data had already been published, the German Statistical Office would publish a correction.