Data Mechanics

Prison population

People in prison per 100,000 inhabitants.

The prison population rate is the number of people held in prisons and remand centres per 100,000 inhabitants, including those awaiting trial. The World Prison Brief, kept by the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research in London, collects the figures from prison administrations, every year or two for most countries since 2000; Our World in Data republishes them. The United States and El Salvador imprison the largest shares of their people.

World map · Prisoners per 100,000 people

Source: Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (2026); Population based on various sources (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data (updated 2026-01-21) · fetched 30 Oct 2026

Over time · Prisoners per 100,000 people

Source: Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (2026); Population based on various sources (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data (updated 2026-01-21) · fetched 30 Oct 2026

Years
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All countries · Prisoners per 100,000 people

Source: Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (2026); Population based on various sources (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data (updated 2026-01-21) · fetched 30 Oct 2026

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Every country and year, with the source on each row.

Portrait of Klaus Jürgen Folz

About the author

Hello there, I’m Klaus Jürgen Folz. I studied Mechanical Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, and I work in Austria as a lead Python and Power BI developer. I built Data Mechanics because good decisions start with facts. Public data is often scattered, hard to find or locked behind paywalls, and too much of what we read about the world is biased. Here, every number is shown as it was published, next to its source, so anyone can check it, compare countries and leaders, and draw their own conclusions.

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