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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.
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 ...
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).
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.
The UNODC estimates that 11.2 million people were held in prison globally by the end of 2021, after a decrease in 2020 due to COVID-19. The report examines the regional and gender variations, the share of unsentenced prisoners, and the progress towards SDG 16.3.
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.
Data shown in this table refer to the total prison population. As per UN-CTS definition, prison population is composed of Persons Held in Prisons, Penal Institutions or Correctional...
