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List of countries by incarceration rate
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an alphabetical list of countries and some dependent territories and subnational areas which lays out the incarceration rate of each.[2]
Incarceration rates table
See the individual World Prison Brief (WPB) country and subnational area pages for more info on data, dates, and much more. WPB notes this: "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."[2]
- Note: Table data fully updated from Our World in Data dataset. It says it was fully updated Jan 21, 2026 from World Prison Brief. Some individual countries updated directly from WPB since then. OWID says its next expected dataset update is in January 2027.[1]
- Note: Asterisk (*) indicates "Incarceration in LOCATION" or "Crime in LOCATION" links.
See also
- Capital punishment by country
- Crime statistics
- List of prisons
- List of countries by intentional homicide rate
- List of U.S. states by intentional homicide rate
- List of U.S. states and territories by incarceration and correctional supervision rate
- United States incarceration rate
- Category:Penal systems by country
Notes
- United Kingdom: The OWID dataset provides a rate for the UK as a whole, but not for its parts. UK is in the above table. The World Prison Brief (WPB) site does not provide a rate for the UK as a whole. WPB provides rates for subnational areas of the UK. Such as: England and Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Anguilla, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Jersey, British Virgin Islands. Their numbers are listed separately in the WPB highest-to-lowest lists and charts. The World Prison Brief site also has individual pages for each of them. To find those pages go to the main reference.[2] Then go to the Data Analysis Tool. Use your browser "find" to search for any of the UK parts on the page. You should be able to find them all. The Europe region page also has links to most of them. The rate for the United Kingdom as a whole can be calculated by adding up their prison populations, and then dividing by their combined population. That must be what OWID is doing.
