Prison population rate

What it is

The World Prison Brief is a free online database of prison systems around the world, hosted by the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR) at Birkbeck, University of London. It ranks countries by prison population rate: everyone held in prison, including pre-trial detainees and remand prisoners, per 100,000 people. Our World in Data, a non-profit statistics website, shows the same series on a world map (data from 1993 to 2026).

Why it matters

The rate shows how heavily a country relies on imprisonment. In the list of 224 prison systems, El Salvador has the highest rate at 1,659 per 100,000 people, followed by Cuba (794), Turkmenistan (about 576) and the United States (542).

How to read it

Figures come mainly from governments and other official sources, and country pages are updated monthly, so the latest year differs from country to country. The rate reflects sentencing laws, the use of pre-trial detention and the capacity of courts as well as crime levels. On the map, darker shades mean more prisoners per 100,000 people; where a 2026 figure is missing, the closest year between 2018 and 2025 is shown.

Limits

The World Prison Brief publishes the shares of pre-trial detainees, women and foreign nationals among prisoners, and prison occupancy, as separate lists; the map shows the overall rate only. Countries define who counts as a prisoner in different ways.

Sources

• World Prison Brief (ICPR): home page
• World Prison Brief: Highest to Lowest, prison population rate
• World Prison Brief: World Prison Brief data
• ICPR: World Prison Brief project page
• Our World in Data: Prison population rate (interactive map and data)
• Our World in Data: Prison population rate (PNG chart)

License

Chart: Our World in Data, CC BY 4.0. Data: Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research, World Prison Brief (2026); population from various sources (2024), with minor processing by Our World in Data. The map was cropped from the Our World in Data chart.

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