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List of countries by incarceration rate

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 23, 2026
Entity authorityQ2625295 ↗
Source-derived summary

This is an alphabetical list of countries and some dependent territories and subnational areas which lays out the incarceration rate of each.

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."

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.

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.

Editorial summary

“List of countries by incarceration rate” enters the record as wikimedia list article. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what List, countries and incarceration can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2026, 2027—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around List, countries and incarceration.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“List of countries by incarceration rate” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, List, countries and incarceration provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2625295. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2026 and 2027.

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A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “List of countries by incarceration rate” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.