Almost two hundred of the criminals missing after being recalled to jail for breaking the terms of their release are foreigners, the Home Office has announced.

A total of 192 of the 954 offenders who have broken the terms of their release but remain on the run are foreign national prisoners. Sixty four of them should have been considered for deportation on their release but were let out without the authorities considering their cases.

Among the 954 are 20 murderers, including one who has been missing for 25 years, and 15 rapists.

Incredibly, two police forces in England and Wales said data protection rules meant they would not publish the names and pictures of local criminals who breached the terms of their release from prison and disappeared.

Merseyside and North Wales police said they would refuse to release names in some circumstances because of the Data Protection Act. Only Derbyshire Constabulary published the details of all the offenders.

Figures published by the Home Office show there are now 12,122 foreign prisoners compared to around 10,000 just a year ago. Over the past five years, while the number of British prisoners has gone up by about 10 percent, there has been an 80 percent increase in foreign prisoners, taking up 4,000 more prison places than anticipated.

The prison population is now made up of people from 164 different countries, with the largest number from Jamaica (1,490), followed by Nigeria (1,070).

If there were not so many foreign inmates, there would not even be a crisis. In 1996, there were fewer than 5,000 overseas prisoners.

Research by the Prison Reform Trust found that at two prisons – Verne, in Dorset, and Morton Hall, Lincs – foreign nationals made up half of the population and were a quarter of the total in 16 jails.

Prison Service figures show that the vast majority of foreign national prisoners have committed drugs offences. Eight in 10 jailed foreign women have been convicted of drugs offences.

The large number of foreign prisoners has led to two prisons being set aside exclusively for them at a cost of millions of pounds. More than 400 inmates from abroad are locked up at Bullwood Hall, Essex, and Canterbury Prison, Kent.

The scheme costs substantially more per prisoner than the national average. At Bullwood, each prisoner costs the taxpayer £40,478 per year, and at Canterbury £38,610 annually. The average ‘normal’ cost for holding category C prisoners is about £24,000 per year.

Official figures from the Justice Ministry in Britain show that at least 11 percent of all prisoners in jail in mid-2008 were Muslim – a striking indication of that community’s grossly disproportionate participation in crime in Britain.

* It would have been better if these foreign criminals were not even allowed into Britain in the first place, as Mr Nick Griffin MEP suggested.