Open Data API

Endpoints

• /api/v1/countries

  List every country with headline statistics.

• /api/v1/countries/{slug}

  Single country: stats, trend series, facts, sources, country-level risk aggregate.

• /api/v1/prisons

  List + filter prisons. Query params: q, country, security, facility_type, gender, risk_tier, sort (name|risk_desc|risk_asc), page, per_page.

• /api/v1/prisons/{slug}

  Single prison: full profile, reports, trends, sources, computed risk breakdown.

• /api/exports/{country_slug}.json

  Full per-country JSON dump (country + prisons + trends + facts + sources). Streams as a download.

• /api/exports/{country_slug}.csv

  Per-country prison CSV with a comment banner identifying the licence + accessed-on date.

Quick examples

# All countries
curl https://worldprisons.com/api/v1/countries | jq .

# Filter prisons: critical-tier in France, sorted by risk
curl "https://worldprisons.com/api/v1/prisons?country=france&risk_tier=critical&sort=risk_desc" | jq .

# Single prison
curl https://worldprisons.com/api/v1/prisons/adx-florence | jq .

# Bulk CSV
curl -O https://worldprisons.com/api/exports/united-kingdom.csv

Bulk downloads per country

One-click JSON or CSV per country. Each file includes a comment / metadata banner with the licence and the accessed-on date.

Terms

• Licence: CC-BY 4.0. Attribute “World Prisons” with a link to https://worldprisons.com.
• No key required for read access. Behave well: don't hammer; cache locally.
• Caching: v1 endpoints set s-maxage=300-600. Exports are cached for 30 minutes.
• Reliability: not a 99.9% SLA. This is a public reference, not a paid service. If you build something mission-critical on top, mirror the data.
• Spotted a bug? Suggest a correction from any country / prison page — the form on every detail page emails us directly.