About

World Prisons exists because basic facts about prisons — how big they are, who runs them, who's inside, how to write to someone incarcerated there — are scattered across hundreds of websites and harder to find than they should be. We pull them into one place.

Who this is for

• Families looking up visiting times or mailing addresses.
• Researchers comparing systems internationally.
• Journalists checking population, overcrowding, oversight, and operator figures.
• Advocates documenting conditions across multiple jurisdictions.
• Historians researching sites of past detention (Gulag, Holocaust-era camps, Riksarkivet).

What's here today

World Prisons currently indexes:

• 162 countries with population, incarceration rate, occupancy, pre-trial share, and other headline statistics on /countries (see also /regions).
• ~31,000 individual facilities across those 162 countries, browsable at /prisons, on the world map, and grouped by facility type.
• ~1,700 oversight reports from national NPMs (Argentina Defensor del Pueblo, Brazil CNPT, France CGLPL, Mexico CNDH, UK HMIP + IMB, and 30+ others), plus HRW/Marshall Project/ProPublica reporting where facility-specific.
• ~3,600 notable inmates sourced from Wikidata P2632, with per-person incarceration history — see /persons.
• ~10,000 human-rights cases from the European Court of Human Rights (Articles 3 and 5), UN Special Rapporteurs, CPT visit reports, and ECHR HUDOC — browsable at /cases.
• Historical sites of detention — Gulag Online, Riksarkivet, and USHMM/EHRI Holocaust-era camps and ghettos at /historical.
• Reform ecosystem — organisations, reports, and country initiatives at /reform.
• Curated views — leaderboards and gap analysis at /insights and demographics.

How we source data

Every field on every entity is traceable to a public source we cite verbatim. Structural data (capacity, security level, coordinates) comes from national prison authorities where available; historical + narrative data comes from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and the treaty bodies + NPMs listed above. We do not fabricate content; if a facility page is thin, that reflects what the public record contains today.

We publish our full list of sources at /data-sources, and each row surfaces its own citations on its detail page.

Contribute

• Corrections— every prison page has a “Suggest a correction” form (/contribute lists the recently accepted contributions).
• Subscribe — set up an email digest for a country or facility to catch material changes (population shifts, closures, new oversight reports).
• Cite us — data is released under CC-BY-4.0, machine-readable at /api (JSON + CSV, no key required).

What's next

Ongoing work:

• Deeper per-facility narrative coverage in countries currently thin (Poland, Indonesia, Türkiye, Iran, Ukraine, and others).
• Broader oversight-report ingestion (HRW annual country chapters, Amnesty POL10, ACHPR, IACHR).
• Continuous freshness monitoring for the ~40,000 citation URLs, so pages you find here are pinned to sources that still resolve.
• User-facing tools: prison-vs-prison compare, related-facilities panels, weekly change digests via RSS + email.

Not affiliated with any government, prison administration, or advocacy group. Corrections and source additions welcome via /contribute.