In 2023 Turkey had the highest incarceration rate among European countries, at 408 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, followed by Georgia, which had an incarceration of 256. The country with the lowest incarceration rate in this year was Liechtenstein, which had 15 people in prison for every 100,000 inhabitants. Germany had one of the lowest rates of 69 when compared with other major European countries such as France and England & Wales, which had rates of 106 and 136 respectively. The Russian Federation has in previous years been the country with the highest incarceration rate in the Council of Europe's data, however, as the country was removed as a member of the council in 2022 due to their invasion of Ukraine, data for Russia is no longer available.

The data contain records of sentenced offenders released from the custody of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) during fiscal year 2003. The data include commitments of United States District Court, violators of conditions of release (e.g., parole, probation, or supervised release violators), offenders convicted in other courts (e.g., military or District of Columbia courts), and persons admitted to prison as material witnesses or for purposes of treatment, examination, or transfer to another authority. Records of offenders who exit federal prison temporarily, such as for transit to another location, to serve a weekend sentence, or for health care, are not included in the exiting cohort. These data include variables that describe the offender, such as age, race, citizenship, as well as variables that describe the sentences and expected prison terms. The data file contains original variables from the Bureau of Prisons' SENTRY database, as well as "SAF" variables that denote subsets of the data. These SAF variables are related to statistics reported in the Compendium of Federal Justice Statistics, Tables 7.9-7.16. Variables containing identifying information (e.g., name, Social Security Number) were replaced with blanks, and the day portions of date fields were also sanitized in order to protect the identities of individuals. These data are part of a series designed by the Urban Institute (Washington, DC) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Data and documentation were prepared by the Urban Institute.

In 2023, there were 599 people aged between 30 and 39 imprisoned in Northern Ireland, the most of any group during this year. By comparison, there were just 43 people aged between 18 and 20 in this year.

In 2024, there were 87,869 men and 3,635 women in prisons in England and Wales. Compared with the previous year, this represented an increase for both men and women. This represented a peak in the number of prisoners during this provided time period, and was also the peak for the United Kingdom as a whole.
Demographics of prisoners There were 29,339 prisoners in their 30s in England and Wales in 2024, the most of any age group. In this year, there were also 3,354 prisoners who were aged between 15 and 20, with a further 21,381 prisoners who were in their 20s. In terms of the ethnicity of prisoners in England and Wales, 63,103 people in jail were White, 10,624 were Black, and 7,067were Asian. As of the same year, the most common religious faith of prisoners was Christianity, at 39,068 inmates, followed by 27,122 who identified as having no religion, with a further 15,909 who were Muslims. Increase in prison officers since 2017 The 23,614 prison officers working in England and Wales in 2024 was almost as high as 2011 when there were 24,369 officers. From 2010 onwards, the number of prison officers fell from 24,830 to 18,251 by 2014, and stayed at comparably low levels until 2018. Low government expenditure on Prisons during the same time period suggests this was a result of the austerity policies implemented by the UK government at that time. The government has steadily increased spending on prisons since 2019/20, with spending on prisons reaching 6.09 billion in 2022/23. This has however not been enough to avert a possible overcrowding crisis in England and Wales, which had just 768 spare prison places in September 2023.

Analysis of the risk of suicide and drug-related deaths among prisoners, including the number of deaths, standarised mortality ratios and age-standardised rates, England and Wales, 2008 to 2019.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The HMIP (His Majesty's Inspectorate of Prisons) Prisoner Surveys (also formerly known as Detainee Surveys) are part of the Inspectorate's duties to inspect prisons. Surveys of prisoners have been carried out systematically since 2000 at institutions being inspected, to gain important insight into detainees' experiences of offender management whilst in custody.

Prisoners are issued with the survey questionnaire to return to the HMIP team, which processes the data to inform inspections of individual institutions and the HMIP annual reports.

The survey is grouped into topics/themes of questions with response categories, as well as providing space for prisoners to add additional comments (such text comments are not included in these datasets).

The specific objectives of the HMIP Prisoner Survey series are as follows:

• to produce data that are comparable as possible over time and between custodial institutions;
• to provide data for a large and representative sample of adult prisoners in England and Wales. So far, over 20 years' worth of data has been collected. The survey conducted in 2020/21 was subject to HMIP COVID-19 restrictions.

Further information can be found on the HMIP Prisoner Survey webpage.

End User Licence and Special Licence versions

Two versions of the HMIP Prisoner Survey are held at UKDS: an End User Licence (EUL) version (SN 9161) that is subject to registration and standard access conditions, and a more detailed Special Licence (SL) version (SN 9068), which has additional access restrictions. The document 'end_user_licence_group_changes', available with the EUL version, SN 9161, details the differences between the two versions. Users should obtain the EUL version first to see whether it is suitable for their needs before considering making an application for access to the SL version.

Latest edition information

For the third edition (October 2024), data and documentation for 2023/24 were added to the study.

Main Topics:

Topics covered include demographic categories, functional type of institution, prisoners' experiences of arrival, conditions in prison, support needs and access to legal rights, issues of safety and behavioural management, education and preparation for release.

The data file also contains some sample and administrative variables from the inspection. There are no weighting variables.

List of Topics/Themes (section titles may vary across survey years)

• A Administrative data derived from the inspection
• B Background information
• C Arrival and reception
• D First night and induction
• E On the wing
• F Food and canteen
• G Relationship with staff
• H Faith
• J Contact with family and friends
• K Time out of cell
• L Applications, complaints, and legal rights
• M Health care
• N Other support needs
• P Alcohol and drugs
• Q Safety
• R Behaviour management
• S Education, skills, and work
• T Planning and progression
• U Preparation for release
• V More about you
• W Final questions about this prison

As of 2023, there were approximately 2,527 prisoners in Scotland aged between 25 and 34, the highest among the provided age groups. By contrast, there were just 248 prisoners aged 65 or over.

As of February 2025, El Salvador had the highest prisoner rate worldwide, with over 1,600 prisoners per 100,000 of the national population. Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, and the United States, rounded out the top five countries with the highest rate of incarceration. Homicides in El Salvador Interestingly, El Salvador, which long had the highest global homicide rates, has dropped out of the top 20 after a high number of gang members have been incarcerated. A high number of the countries with the highest homicide rate are located in Latin America. Prisoners in the United StatesThe United States is home to the largest number of prisoners worldwide. More than 1.8 million people were incarcerated in the U.S. at the beginning of 2025. In China, the estimated prison population totaled 1.69 million people that year. Other nations had far fewer prisoners. The largest share of the U.S. prisoners in federal correctional facilities were of African-American origin. As of 2020, there were 345,500 black, non-Hispanic prisoners, compared to 327,300 white, non-Hispanic inmates. The U.S. states with the largest number of prisoners in 2022 were Texas, California, and Florida. Over 160,000 prisoners in state facilities were sentenced for rape or sexual assault, which was the most common cause of imprisonment. The second most common was murder, followed by aggravated or simple assault.

In 2022/23 there were approximately 7,426 male prisoners in Scotland, compared with 282 female ones. During the provided time period, male prisoner numbers in Scotland peaked during 2019/20, when there were 7,796, while the number of female prisoners was highest in 2011/12, at 469.

The Survey of Psychiatric Morbidity among Prisoners in England and Wales was commissioned by the Department of Health in 1997. It aimed to provide up-to-date baseline information about the prevalence of psychiatric problems among male and female remand and sentenced prisoners in order to inform policy decisions about services. Wherever possible, the survey utilised similar assessment instruments to those used in earlier surveys to allow comparison with corresponding data from the OPCS/ONS surveys of individuals resident in private household, institutions catering for people with mental health problems, and homeless people (see SNs 3560, 3585 and 3642 respectively). In addition the survey aimed to examine the varying use of services and the receipt of care in relation to mental disorder and to establish key, current and lifetime factors which may be associated with mental disorders of prisoners.

Following the FCA's Policy Statement on the changes to the responsible lending rules, it has published further data on the mortgage prisoner population. The FCA's Mortgage Market Study estimated that around 140,000 borrowers were unable to switch to a better deal even though they were up-to-date with their payments. To help fix this it changed its rules late last year to allow lenders to assess affordability based on a borrower’s track record of making mortgage payments.

The charts show analysis of the entire dataset which includes all borrowers in closed mortgage books and those who have mortgages owned by unregulated firms regardless of their eligibility to switch because of our new rules. The FCA conducted a data gathering exercise which collected details on all mortgage accounts owned by unregulated firms. This data was combined with details of mortgage accounts held in closed books of regulated firms.

At the beginning of 2025, the United States had the highest number of incarcerated individuals worldwide, with around 1.8 million people in prison. China followed with around 100,000 fewer prisoners. Brazil followed in third. The incarceration problem in the U.S. The United States has an incredibly high number of incarcerated individuals. Therefore, the incarceration problem has become a widely contested issue, because it impacts disadvantaged people and minorities the most. Additionally, the prison system has become capitalized by outside corporations that fund prisons, but there is still a high cost to taxpayers. Furthermore, there has been an increase in the amount of private prisons that have been created. For-profit prison companies have come under scrutiny because of their lack of satisfactory staff and widespread lobbying. Violent offenses are the most common type of offense among prisoners in the U.S. Incarceration rates worldwide El Salvador had the highest rate of incarceration worldwide, at 1,659 prisoners per 100,000 residents as of February 2025. Cuba followed in second with 794 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants. The incarceration rate is a better measure to use when comparing countries than the total prison populations, which will naturally have the most populous countries topping the list.

Slice created from parent data set: Full Virginia Girls' Reformatory Admissions Database 1910-1938

Data set of 2,370 individual female reformatory inmates admitted to the Virginia Home and Industrial School for Girls at Bon Air and the Industrial Home School for Colored Girls at Peake’s Turnout between 1910 and 1938. Created out of the unpublished and archived admissions books of these institutions. Due to Virginia’s 75-year privacy restriction, I stopped collecting at December 1938 for each institution. Data from the Home at Bon Air runs 1910 to 1938; from the Home at Peake’s Turnout from 1915 to 1938. Each reformatory kept separate books, which were archived into separate collections. There was enough similarity between the two books to transcribe the data into one large data set.

Reformatory administrators hand wrote basic administrative information about each girl into bound books. For incoming delinquent girls, they recorded: student number, name, birthdate or age at admittance, date of admittance, and committing jurisdiction (by county or city jurisdiction.) The books also recorded the individual’s parole history, including first parole (and up to her third parole on an individual’s performance) and any return dates; administrators recorded the destination of the first parole, but this was inconsistently recorded. The books note when and to whom inmates were married, usually after their official dismissal. Because transferring an inmate officially removed them from the responsibility of the reformatory, administrators recorded transfer information, including where they went and when. Lastly, the books recorded the official dismissal date and reason. Bon Air’s books were more consistent with recording dismissals and neither institution used consistent definitions of “transfer” versus “dismissal.”

I manually transcribed these books verbatim into a database. From this core data, I added categories of information to aid my analysis. These include: race, gender, and reformatory; calculations of either age or birthdate (Peake’s recorded birthdates, Bon Air only ages); parole year taken from the first parole date; parole type determined by me based on the parole destination, if recorded. To help me analyze transfer and dismissal information, I determined the “type” and “category” of each transfer or dismissal and added new categories. These allowed me to “rollup” the varieties of recorded data into fewer descriptive types and categories. Because administrators recorded only the institution name or location when girls were transferred and dismissed elsewhere, this allowed me to organize this info into 18 “types”: asylum, colony, court, death, department of public welfare, escape, family, honorable discharge, illegal commitment, maternity, orphanage, other, penal, private, reorganization (only used for Bon Air in 1914), sanitorium/hospital, venereal disease, and wages. These 18 “types” were then further distilled into 9 “categories” to capture the broadest possible categorization of the reasons why girls were transferred or dismissed: administrative, death, escape, mental, penal, physical, private, unknown, and work.

I have removed the names of the individual inmates upon publication. Researchers interested in using this data in their own work can contact me at erin@erinbush.org to request the versions that include full name fields. The Data Dictionary is also available upon request.

The contents of these data sets, as government records, I believe fall under fair use.

Full Collection

• Full Virginia Girls' Reformatory Admissions Database 1910-1938: https://zenodo.org/records/3872019
• Full Virginia Girls' Reformatory Transfer and Dismissal Data 1910-1938: https://zenodo.org/records/3872110
• Full Virginia Girls' Reformatory Parole Data 1910-1938: https://zenodo.org/records/3872100

This dataset lists inmates incarcerated at Cockatoo Island prison in Sydney (Australia) between 1847-1869. It offers insights into how the colonial criminal justice system operated after New South Wales’ transition from a penal colony to a ‘free’ colony when transportation ceased in 1840. It is a useful tool for genealogists tracing the lives of their criminal ancestors and for historians of crime and punishment researching nineteenth-century Australia. The dataset includes prisoners' names and aliases, their ship of arrival, place of origin, details of their colonial conviction(s) (trial place, court, offence, sentence), date(s) admitted to Cockatoo Island, and when and how they were discharged from Cockatoo Island. In some cases, it also includes prisoners' place of origin, occupation, biometric information (height, eye/hair colour, complexion, scars, tattoos), 'condition upon arrival' (convict or free), and (for convicts) details of their original conviction in Britain or Ireland. As a UNESCO World Heritage 'Convict Site' Cockatoo Island is best known as a site of secondary punishment for recidivist convicts, especially those transferred from Norfolk Island. This dataset demonstrates the diversity of the prison population: including nominally free convicts (ticket-of-leave holders), migrants from Britain, China and other Australian colonies drawn in by the gold rush, exiles from Port Phillip, Aboriginal Australians convicted during frontier warfare, colonial-born white Australians (including bushrangers), and black, Indian and American sailors visiting Sydney.

Significant attention has been paid to the more than 160,000 British and Irish convicts who were transported Australia as colonists between 1787 and 1868. Much less has been said about those punished within the criminal justice system that arose in the wake of New South Wales' transition from 'penal' to 'free' colony (Finnane, 1997: x-xi). Cockatoo Island prison opened in 1839, a year before convict transportation to New South Wales ceased, and was intended to punish the most recidivist and violent of the transported convicts. This archetype has prevailed in historical discourses, and they have been described as 'criminal lunatics... [and] criminals incapable of reform' (Parker, 1977: 61); 'the most desperate and abandoned characters' (O'Carrigan, 1994: 64); and people of 'doubtful character' (NSW Government Architect's Office, 2009: 29). Yet, this was far from the truth. My analysis of 1666 prisoners arriving between 1839-52 show they were overwhelming non-violent offenders, tried for minor property crimes at lower courts. They were also far more diverse population than commonly recognised, including Indigenous Australian, Chinese and black convicts alongside majority British and Irish men (Harman, 2012). This project will make publicly available extremely detailed records relating to Cockatoo Island's prisoners to show people firsthand exactly who made up the inmate population. The digital version of the original registers will include information on convicts' criminal record, but also their job, whether they were married or had children, and even what they looked like. It will also be a name-searchable database so family historians can search for their ancestors, who may have been incarcerated on the island. As it stands, they will be able find information online about ancestors who were transported as long as they remained in the 'convict system', but they may seem to disappear as soon as they are awarded their ticket-of-leave and become 'free'. However, many former convicts, and free immigrants, to New South Wales were convicted locally, and these records can give us information about their lives within the colony. The type of data included in these registers will also allow researchers to investigate questions including: (1) were convicts more likely to offend again than free immigrants? (2) Were the children of convicts more likely to offend than others? (3) Did the influx of mostly Chinese migrants during the gold rush actually lead to a crime-wave, as reported in the press? (4) Were laws introduced between 1830 and 1853, actually effective at prosecuting bushrangers (highwaymen)? (5) Was the criminal-judicial system in Australia more rehabilitative, despite developing out of a harsher convict transportation system? Alongside the dataset, the website will include 'life-biographies' of individual convicts to show you how this dataset can be used to piece together a life-story. It also to warns against understanding a real-life person only through the records of their conviction. There many of fascinating stories to tell, including those 'John Perry' ('Black Perry') the prizewinning boxer; the love story of the 'Two Fredericks'; and Tan, the Chinese gold-digger who resisted his incarceration. In addition, there will be teaching resources for secondary school children and undergraduate university students who want to engage directly...

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

By their nature, prisons engender potentially violent conflicts; this research project explored the circumstances which led to violence in prisons; the consequences of violent confrontations for prisoners and staff; and the ways in which conflicts with the potential to lead to violence were resolved without recourse to physical force. This project sought to understand why a particular situation became violent and to what extent the violence was considered to have settled the matter. The study took place in four different types of establishment: a high security prison, a local prison, a women's prison, and a young offender institution. The main aims and objectives were:
1. To analyse inter-personal violence in penal institutions; to explore the circumstances in which conflicts escalate into physical injury or threats to safety.
2. To identify methods of communication, conciliation, or mediation used by staff and inmates to reduce the likelihood of a violent outcome; to outline the interests of perpetrators and victims, how they interpret their actions and the norms that guide their decision-making.
3. To assess the response of the institution and to assess whether the official response played a role in resolving such conflicts.
4. To clarify the conditions under which the use of force by inmates or staff is considered acceptable; to examine the circumstances in which staff decide that 'control and restraint' techniques are required.
5. To compare the forms of violence in different types of population, distinguished by the age, gender and race of prisoners and staff.
Main Topics:

This data collection utilises both quantitative and qualitative methods.

The quantitative data consists of results from six structured questionnaire surveys collected from prisoners and prison staff; participants in and witnesses to violent incidents in prison. In addition to basic biographical and demographic details, information was collected about the extent and possible causes of these incidents; and the attitudes and responses to them.

The qualitative data consists of 129 'incident analyses' of individual violent, or potentially violent, incidents that occurred in English penal institutions. Typically, each analysis includes demographical and biographical details of the prisoners involved, extracts and summaries from semi-structured interviews held with them, with witnesses and with prison staff concerning the incident. Also included are digests of 'conflict escalators', giving brief details of eight specified factors present in each violent incident, designed to provide a structured account of the event. These incident analyses have been anonymised and the information provided has been further restricted to prevent identification of those involved from descriptions of the event.