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The numbers are striking: While immigrants (legal and illegal) account for 35 percent of California adults, they represent just 17 percent of the state’s prisoners. Men born in the United States are incarcerated in California prisons at more than two times the rate of foreign-born men. Within the age group most often involved in crime (ages 18 to 40), US natives – astonishingly – are 10 times more likely to be in prison or jail than immigrants (4.2 percent of the former are in correctional institutions, and just 0.42 percent of the latter). Even when the focus is narrowed to inmates who were born in Mexico and are not citizens – the demographic group most likely to include illegal immigrants – the rate of incarceration is only one-eighth that of men born in the United States.

–Immigration and Crime