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The United States leads the world in total number of people incarcerated, with more than 2 million prisoners nationwide (per data released in October 2021 by World Prison Brief). This number is equivalent to roughly 25% of the world's total prison population and leads to an incarceration rate of 629 people per 100,000—the highest rate in the ...
- Crime Rates
10. Peru. Rounding up the list, Peru is one of the largest...
- Murder Rates
While 2022's global murder rate was 6.1 (per 100k people),...
- Crime Rates
This is an alphabetical list of countries and some dependent territories and subnational areas which lays out the incarceration rate of each. [1] Prison population rates from World Prison Brief. See date on map.
PRISON MATTERS 2024: Global Prison Population and Trends; A Focus on Rehabilitation between 2019 and 2020 before increasing again in 2021 and 2022 (respectively to 143 and 144 prisoners per 100,000 population).
This fourteenth edition of the World Prison Population List gives details of the number of prisoners held in 223 prison systems in independent countries and dependent territories. It shows the differences in the levels of imprisonment across the world and makes possible an estimate of the world prison population total.
Please click on each individual country to see the date to which the data refer. As it is not possible to obtain meaningful comparative data on numbers of children in custody in different countries, we do not include juvenile imprisonment data in the highest to lowest lists.
The World Prison Brief is an online database providing free access to information on prison systems around the world. It is a unique resource, which supports evidence-based development of prison policy and practice globally.
Notwithstanding the decrease in 2020, overall the global prison population has increased by 17 per cent since the start of the 21 st century. As of 2021, there were an estimated 142 prisoners for every 100,000 population globally.
