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.

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.

Overview

The Marshall Project, the nonprofit investigative newsroom dedicated to the U.S. criminal justice system, has partnered with The Associated Press to compile data on the prevalence of COVID-19 infection in prisons across the country. The Associated Press is sharing this data as the most comprehensive current national source of COVID-19 outbreaks in state and federal prisons.

Lawyers, criminal justice reform advocates and families of the incarcerated have worried about what was happening in prisons across the nation as coronavirus began to take hold in the communities outside. Data collected by The Marshall Project and AP shows that hundreds of thousands of prisoners, workers, correctional officers and staff have caught the illness as prisons became the center of some of the country’s largest outbreaks. And thousands of people — most of them incarcerated — have died.

In December, as COVID-19 cases spiked across the U.S., the news organizations also shared cumulative rates of infection among prison populations, to better gauge the total effects of the pandemic on prison populations. The analysis found that by mid-December, one in five state and federal prisoners in the United States had tested positive for the coronavirus -- a rate more than four times higher than the general population.

This data, which is updated weekly, is an effort to track how those people have been affected and where the crisis has hit the hardest.

Methodology and Caveats

The data tracks the number of COVID-19 tests administered to people incarcerated in all state and federal prisons, as well as the staff in those facilities. It is collected on a weekly basis by Marshall Project and AP reporters who contact each prison agency directly and verify published figures with officials.

Each week, the reporters ask every prison agency for the total number of coronavirus tests administered to its staff members and prisoners, the cumulative number who tested positive among staff and prisoners, and the numbers of deaths for each group.

The time series data is aggregated to the system level; there is one record for each prison agency on each date of collection. Not all departments could provide data for the exact date requested, and the data indicates the date for the figures.

To estimate the rate of infection among prisoners, we collected population data for each prison system before the pandemic, roughly in mid-March, in April, June, July, August, September and October. Beginning the week of July 28, we updated all prisoner population numbers, reflecting the number of incarcerated adults in state or federal prisons. Prior to that, population figures may have included additional populations, such as prisoners housed in other facilities, which were not captured in our COVID-19 data. In states with unified prison and jail systems, we include both detainees awaiting trial and sentenced prisoners.

To estimate the rate of infection among prison employees, we collected staffing numbers for each system. Where current data was not publicly available, we acquired other numbers through our reporting, including calling agencies or from state budget documents. In six states, we were unable to find recent staffing figures: Alaska, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maryland, Montana, Utah.

To calculate the cumulative COVID-19 impact on prisoner and prison worker populations, we aggregated prisoner and staff COVID case and death data up through Dec. 15. Because population snapshots do not account for movement in and out of prisons since March, and because many systems have significantly slowed the number of new people being sent to prison, it’s difficult to estimate the total number of people who have been held in a state system since March. To be conservative, we calculated our rates of infection using the largest prisoner population snapshots we had during this time period.

As with all COVID-19 data, our understanding of the spread and impact of the virus is limited by the availability of testing. Epidemiology and public health experts say that aside from a few states that have recently begun aggressively testing in prisons, it is likely that there are more cases of COVID-19 circulating undetected in facilities. Sixteen prison systems, including the Federal Bureau of Prisons, would not release information about how many prisoners they are testing.

Corrections departments in Indiana, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota and Wisconsin report coronavirus testing and case data for juvenile facilities; West Virginia reports figures for juvenile facilities and jails. For consistency of comparison with other state prison systems, we removed those facilities from our data that had been included prior to July 28. For these states we have also removed staff data. Similarly, Pennsylvania’s coronavirus data includes testing and cases for those who have been released on parole. We removed these tests and cases for prisoners from the data prior to July 28. The staff cases remain.

About the Data

There are four tables in this data:

• covid_prison_cases.csv contains weekly time series data on tests, infections and deaths in prisons. The first dates in the table are on March 26. Any questions that a prison agency could not or would not answer are left blank.

• prison_populations.csv contains snapshots of the population of people incarcerated in each of these prison systems for whom data on COVID testing and cases are available. This varies by state and may not always be the entire number of people incarcerated in each system. In some states, it may include other populations, such as those on parole or held in state-run jails. This data is primarily for use in calculating rates of testing and infection, and we would not recommend using these numbers to compare the change in how many people are being held in each prison system.

• staff_populations.csv contains a one-time, recent snapshot of the headcount of workers for each prison agency, collected as close to April 15 as possible.

• covid_prison_rates.csv contains the rates of cases and deaths for prisoners. There is one row for every state and federal prison system and an additional row with the National totals.

Queries

The Associated Press and The Marshall Project have created several queries to help you use this data:

Get your state's prison COVID data: Provides each week's data from just your state and calculates a cases-per-100000-prisoners rate, a deaths-per-100000-prisoners rate, a cases-per-100000-workers rate and a deaths-per-100000-workers rate here

Rank all systems' most recent data by cases per 100,000 prisoners here

Find what percentage of your state's total cases and deaths -- as reported by Johns Hopkins University -- occurred within the prison system here

Attribution

In stories, attribute this data to: “According to an analysis of state prison cases by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit investigative newsroom dedicated to the U.S. criminal justice system, and The Associated Press.”

Contributors

Many reporters and editors at The Marshall Project and The Associated Press contributed to this data, including: Katie Park, Tom Meagher, Weihua Li, Gabe Isman, Cary Aspinwall, Keri Blakinger, Jake Bleiberg, Andrew R. Calderón, Maurice Chammah, Andrew DeMillo, Eli Hager, Jamiles Lartey, Claudia Lauer, Nicole Lewis, Humera Lodhi, Colleen Long, Joseph Neff, Michelle Pitcher, Alysia Santo, Beth Schwartzapfel, Damini Sharma, Colleen Slevin, Christie Thompson, Abbie VanSickle, Adria Watson, Andrew Welsh-Huggins.

Questions

If you have questions about the data, please email The Marshall Project at info+covidtracker@themarshallproject.org or file a Github issue.

To learn more about AP's data journalism capabilities for publishers, corporations and financial institutions, go here or email kromano@ap.org.

The purpose of the Survey of Jails in Indian Country is an enumeration of all known adult and juvenile facilities -- jails, confinement facilities, detention centers, and other correctional facilities operated by tribal authorities or the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), U.S. Department of the Interior. For the purpose of this collection, Indian country includes reservations, pueblos, rancherias, and other Native American and Alaska Native communities throughout the United States. The survey collects data on the number of adults and juveniles held on the last weekday in June 2021, type of offense, average daily population in June, most crowded day in June, admissions and releases in June, number of inmate deaths and suicide attempts from July 1, 2020 through June 30, 2021, rated capacity on June 30, and jail staffing on June 30, 2021. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) added a special addendum to the 2021 survey to measure the impact of this public health emergency on Indian country jails from July to December 2020.

The South American nation with the highest prison population rate in 2024 was Uruguay, with 449 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, followed by Brazil, with 389 prisoners. The country in South America with the lowest prison population rate was Ecuador, with 179 per 100,000 persons.

The data contain records of sentenced offenders in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) at year-end of fiscal year 2002. 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. 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 2020, approximately 40 percent of the prison population in Malaysia was unsentenced. Contrastingly, just over 11 percent of the prison population in Thailand was unsentenced that year.

Mexico had nearly 233,300 prisoners as of December 2023, around 7,200 prisoners more than the prior year. The volume of imprisoned people in the country followed an increasing trend from 2018 to 2023. Prison population That figure places Mexico among the countries with the largest number of prisoners in the world. However, when taking into account incarceration rates, that is, the number of prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, Mexico falls out of the ranking and is, actually, one of the Latin American and Caribbean countries with the lowest rates, exceeded by far by countries like El Salvador and Cuba, which register four times the prison population rate of Mexico.People aged 30 to 39 years made up for the largest share of prisoners in Mexico. However, the share of people deprived of liberty whose age ranged from 18 to 29 years was significantly largest in the case of women, with 32.1 percent of female prisoners pertaining to such age group, while in the case of men it fell to 25.1 percent. Regarding female inmates, approximately a tenth have been pregnant while being in jail. Furthermore, theft was the most commonly committed crime by women in Mexican states' penitentiary centers in 2022, followed by kidnapping and homicide. Preventive prison The main reason for the rapid growth of prison population in Mexico in recent years is the 2019 reform of the article 19 of the Constitution, which has led to the spread of pretrial detention. Pretrial detention is a measure that leads to the imprisonment of people automatically while they are still being investigated, without having been sentenced, and can last up to two years. The reform allowed for automatic preventive imprisonment for a wider range of crimes than before, with the new list including fuel theft (huachicoleo) and burglary, among others. This affects particularly vulnerable people from poor backgrounds, with low education and who commit petty crimes. As of December 2020, 78.6 percent of pre-trial detainees for robbery in Mexico had not been sentenced, which means that less than a fourth of people in jail for robbery had been found guilty in court. The country had an even higher share of unsentenced prisoners for drug trafficking, with 87.8 percent of people being in preventive detention without charge.. One of the reasons behind the high share of prisoners awaiting sentence is the large number of simultaneous cases that public defenders have to attend to. Depending on the Mexican state in which someone is being prosecuted, a public defender can have up to an average of 336.9 simultaneous cases to defend.

As of 2020, females in Moroccan prisons only represented a share of 2.48 percent. This was contrary to the over 97 percent of male inmates in the country. Overall, the country counted nearly 85 thousand prisoners in the same year.

Intentional homicides are estimates of unlawful homicides purposely inflicted as a result of domestic disputes, interpersonal violence, violent conflicts over land resources, intergang violence over turf or control, and predatory violence and killing by armed groups. Intentional homicide does not include all intentional killing; the difference is usually in the organization of the killing. Individuals or small groups usually commit homicide, whereas killing in armed conflict is usually committed by fairly cohesive groups of up to several hundred members and is thus usually excluded.

There were about 87,784 female prisoners under the jurisdiction of state or federal correctional authorities in the United States as of December 2022. This is an increase from the previous year, when there were 83,651 female prisoners in the country.

Expenses on Prisoners: Telangana: Medical data was reported at 6.000 INR mn in 2022. This records an increase from the previous number of 1.500 INR mn for 2021. Expenses on Prisoners: Telangana: Medical data is updated yearly, averaging 4.070 INR mn from Mar 2015 (Median) to 2022, with 8 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 6.000 INR mn in 2022 and a record low of 1.400 INR mn in 2020. Expenses on Prisoners: Telangana: Medical data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by National Crime Records Bureau. The data is categorized under India Premium Database’s Crime – Table IN.CRO006: Memo Items: Expenses on Prisoners.

As of October 2024, the operational capacity of Italian prisons was about 51,100 inmates. However, there were roughly 62,100 prisoners incarcerated in all Italian penal institutions, over 11,000 more than the regulatory capacity. Indeed, most Italian regions were affected by the overpopulation of jails. Prison population in Italy Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the number of inmates in Italian jails remained rather stable. In the period between 2000 and 2019, the lowest prison population was registered in 2006, whereas the highest number of inmates in custody was reported in 2010. However, the number of detainees in 2020 experienced a decrease. During the coronavirus emergency, certain prisoners were released under supervision in order to reduce overcrowding. Perception of prison overpopulation Italians are aware that the number of inmates in the country’s prisons exceeds the operational capacity. However, in 2018 Italian respondents believed that the penal institutions in their country were more overcrowded than they actually were.

Morocco had nearly 85 thousand prisoners in the country as of 2020, decreasing from around 86.4 thousand in the previous year. The volume of imprisoned people in the country followed an increasing trend within the examined period, registering declines only in 2006 and 2020. Furthermore, Morocco had a prison capacity of 51,776 people as of 2017, which, compared to the current prison population, represents an overcrowding situation in the prison system.

As of 2020, most prisoners in Morocco were between the ages of 20 and 29 years, representing 43.27 percent of the total prison population. Additionally, individuals aged 30 to 39 years covered around 30.5 percent of the inmates in the country. Overall, the country registered close to 85 thousand prisoners in the same year.

As of 2020, 817 prisoners were employed in Moroccan prisons in the area of arts and crafts. This was an increase from the previous year, when the prisoner labor force stood at 691, following an upward trend observed since 2017. Overall, the country counted nearly 85 thousand prisoners in 2020.

As of July 2023, the number of prisoners in Italy was 57,749 inmates. Between 2000 and 2019, Italy's prison population increased, while it experienced a decrease in 2020 and 2021. In 2010, the population of prisoners in custody reached its peak at 68,000 inmates, whereas by the end of 2019, the number of inmates amounted to 60,800 individuals. During the coronavirus emergency, Italy adopted a decree for the supervised release of certain prisoners in order to reduce overcrowding. Thus, the number of detainees in the last year experienced a decrease.

Demography of incarcerated population

Among prisoners, two groups stand out for age and educational level. Data related to the age of people in jail show that individuals between 50 and 59 years old made up the largest group of the prison population (ten thousand inmates). Furthermore, a glance at their educational background reveals that 19 thousand individuals held a lower secondary school degree. Both groups represented a significant part of the incarcerated population.

Overcrowded prisons and tough conditions

Prison overcrowding is a worldwide phenomenon. Prison systems in more than one hundred countries operate at over double their capacities. Likewise, several prisons in Italy hold more prisoners than the facilities can accommodate. In 2019, a jail in the South Italian region Molise was rated the most overcrowded prison in the country, which was occupied at 195 percent of designed prison capacity. In addition to overcrowding, a further problem of the Italian prison system concerns the tough conditions for mafia prisoners. In October 2019, the European court of human rights (ECHR) ruled that the Italian prison system for mafia inmates must be reviewed, as the conditions in which they are serving their life term sentence violate their human rights.

As of 2020, over 37 thousand new prisoners in Morocco had committed crimes under special laws. Additionally, crimes related to property accounted for approximately 25.8 thousand new prisoners in the country, while those committed against persons made up around 12.5 thousand inmates. Overall, close to 105 thousand prisoners, originally in a state of liberty, were counted in the country in 2020.

As of 2020, over 46 thousand prisoners in Morocco were serving a life sentence. The majority was male, reaching around 45.3 thousand, while females made up the remaining 1.9 percent. Overall, the country registered close to 85 thousand prisoners in the same year.

As of 2020, 130 people served life imprisonment in Kenya, of which the majority were men. Since 2017, the number of people sentenced to life long incarceration has been decreasing in the country. Overall, Kenya's prison population declined to 86 thousand in 2020.