There are around 10.36 million prisoners across the world today, according to the World Prison Brief database on prisons and the use of imprisonment – from which the statistics presented in this section of the book are drawn.

The World Prison Brief

The World Prison Brief of the Institute for Criminal Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London, can be accessed at www.prisonstudies.org. It holds statistics on the prison populations of 223 independent countries and dependent territories, along with general information about the prison systems of all these jurisdictions. The Brief is updated on a monthly basis, and its statistics largely derive from each jurisdiction’s national prison administration or the ministry responsible for the administration. Some figures are obtained from national statistical offices, are provided directly to the compilers of the Brief, or derive from international surveys.1

The reliability of the information held on the World Prison Brief depends ultimately on the accuracy of the official figures on which it is based. However, an important check on the figures is provided by the compilers’ continual review of new data for consistency against the patterns of previous figures obtained over the 15 years of the Brief ’s existence. Where this process of validation indicates that figures are dubious, these are excluded from the Brief. Official figures are sometimes challenged by non-governmental bodies and other readers, and the World Prison Brief ’s compilers are responsive to comments and suggestions received.

The figures provided in this chapter of the book and the two that follow are from the World Prison Brief database as at November 2015. Inevitably, the figures vary between and within jurisdictions as to the specific dates to which they refer; but we have used the most recent figures available throughout, and for the vast majority of countries (189 of the 223) the total prison population figure derives from 2014 or 2015.

Data limitations and parameters

There are some gaps in the statistics held on the World Prison Brief and reported in this book. The 223 jurisdictions on which the World Prison Brief holds prison population statistics do not include Eritrea, North Korea and Somalia, because of the difficulty of accessing data on these three states. (However, the database does hold some general information on the prison systems of these countries.