In 2020, the overall incarceration rate (i.e. the number of prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants) continued the slight decline that began in 2013, according to a SPACE Annual Penal Statistics on Prison Population survey from the Council of Europe conducted, as it is every year, by the University of Lausanne and published on Thursday 8 April.
This rate is 103.2 in the 51 prison administrations for which data were available (down 1.7% from 2019). In 2013 it was 131, so the overall decrease is 20%.
This can be partly explained by a decrease in theft and burglary, which has not been compensated for by the increase in cybercrime, the perpetrators of which, often based outside national territory, escape conviction, says Professor Marcelo Aebi, director of the survey.
The countries with the highest incarceration rates are Turkey (357), Russia (356) and Georgia (264). For the European Union, Lithuania (220), the Czech Republic (197), Poland (195), the Slovak Republic (193) and Estonia (184).
The lowest rates are in Iceland (45), Finland (50) and the Netherlands (59).
Prison density has remained broadly stable, with 90.3 prisoners per 100 places in 2020 compared to 89.5 in 2019. However, there is a surplus in Italy, Belgium, Cyprus, France, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia, as well as in Turkey and Serbia.
Women represent 5% of the total prison population and 1,608 children living with their mothers were counted in the 37 jurisdictions that provided their figures. This issue of children of detainees is of particular concern to the Council of Europe, which issued a recommendation in 2018 to protect them.
Link to the SPACE survey: https://bit.ly/3cXByMm (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)