The country with the highest incarceration rate in the world is El Salvador, which holds 1,659 prisoners per 100,000 residents — roughly three times the rate of the next country on the list and enough to put about 1 in 60 Salvadorans behind bars.1World Prison Brief. El Salvador The United States, which held the top spot for decades, now ranks fifth at 542 per 100,000, with roughly 1.83 million people in federal, state, and local custody.2World Prison Brief. Highest to Lowest – Prison Population Rate
How El Salvador Reached the Top
El Salvador’s leap to the top of the rankings happened in a span of about two years. In March 2022, President Nayib Bukele asked the national legislature to pass a state of exception, suspending constitutional protections around due process and granting security forces broad arrest powers.3Washington Office on Latin America. Mass Incarceration and Democratic Deterioration – Three Years of the State of Exception in El Salvador What was framed as a temporary emergency measure has been renewed more than 30 consecutive times. Since the policy took effect, authorities have detained more than 85,000 people.
To house the influx, the government opened the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a mega-prison designed to hold 40,000 inmates. The first prisoners arrived in February 2023. El Salvador’s total prison population reached 109,519 as of March 2024, crammed into a system with an official capacity of 67,289 — an occupancy rate of roughly 163%.1World Prison Brief. El Salvador
The crackdown targeted gang networks like MS-13 and Barrio 18, and murder rates did fall sharply. Human rights organizations have also documented sweeping arrests of people with no gang ties, reliance on anonymous tips as sole evidence, and denial of access to legal counsel. The approach has drawn international criticism for treating mass incarceration as a primary tool of public safety rather than a last resort.
The Rest of the Top Ten
The World Prison Brief tracks incarceration rates for more than 220 countries and territories. As of its most recent data, the top ten by prisoners per 100,000 residents are:2World Prison Brief. Highest to Lowest – Prison Population Rate
- El Salvador: 1,659
- Cuba: 794
- Rwanda: 620
- Turkmenistan: approximately 576
- United States: 542
- American Samoa (U.S.): 538
- Guam (U.S.): 530
- Panama: 527
- Tonga: 516
- Turkey: 489
The gap between first place and everyone else is enormous. Cuba’s rate of 794, the second highest, is less than half of El Salvador’s.4World Prison Brief. Cuba Rwanda’s figure is largely tied to the legal aftermath of the 1994 genocide, with community-based courts processing hundreds of thousands of cases over the past three decades. Turkmenistan’s number is an estimate because the government releases very little official data, and the real figure could be higher.
Each country on the list arrived at the same outcome by a different route. El Salvador’s spike is recent and policy-driven. Cuba’s reflects decades of political repression. Rwanda’s stems from a specific historical catastrophe. The United States built its numbers through a long accumulation of sentencing policies over fifty years.
Why the United States Still Ranks So High
Before El Salvador’s surge, the United States spent decades as the world leader in incarceration. It still locks up more people in absolute numbers than any other country. At 542 per 100,000, it incarcerates its residents at roughly seven to ten times the rate of most Western European countries. Norway, the Netherlands, and Finland all hover around 54 per 100,000, and Germany sits at 71.5University of Lausanne. Prisons and Prisoners in Europe 2024 – Key Findings of the SPACE I Report
The gap isn’t driven by across-the-board higher crime. American sentencing policy is significantly harsher, particularly for drug offenses and repeat convictions. Federal drug trafficking carries a 10-year mandatory minimum for a first offense involving certain quantities, 15 years for a second offense after a prior serious drug or violent felony, and 25 years for a third.6Office of the Law Revision Counsel. United States Code Title 21 – Section 841 Federal law also requires life imprisonment for anyone convicted of a serious violent felony who has two or more prior convictions for serious violent felonies or serious drug offenses.7Office of the Law Revision Counsel. United States Code Title 18 – Section 3559 Most states have their own versions of these habitual-offender laws.
The U.S. prison population declined steadily from its 2009 peak through 2021, then rose about 2% in 2022 across 36 states and the federal system. At the federal level, the population ticked down slightly from 155,972 at the end of 2023 to 154,093 at the end of 2024.8Bureau of Justice Statistics. Federal Prisoner Statistics Collected Under the First Step Act, 2025
Pretrial Detention and Who Gets Counted
One figure worth sitting with: almost one in three people in prison worldwide has not been convicted of anything. They are awaiting trial.9Penal Reform International. Key Facts High pretrial detention rates are common across most continents and are especially acute in low-income countries and nations emerging from conflict. In the United States, local jails hold hundreds of thousands of people who cannot afford bail. Because pretrial detainees are counted in incarceration statistics alongside sentenced prisoners, countries with slow courts or aggressive bail policies look higher on the rankings before anyone is convicted.
How the Rate Is Calculated
The standard measurement is straightforward. Divide the total number of people in custody by the country’s general population, then multiply by 100,000. A country of 5 million people with 10,000 prisoners has a rate of 200 per 100,000. This formula, used by the World Prison Brief and most international researchers, allows for meaningful comparison between countries of vastly different sizes. Raw totals are misleading on their own because they favor large countries regardless of how aggressive their sentencing is.
The underlying data comes from official government reports, justice ministry records, and national prison administrations. Researchers verify that the totals include both sentenced prisoners and pretrial detainees across all levels of confinement. Some governments, particularly authoritarian ones, release incomplete or unreliable figures. That is why Turkmenistan’s rate carries the “approximately” label.
What Happens Inside a System That Incarcerates This Much
High incarceration rates create a problem that nearly every country on the top-ten list struggles with: there are not enough beds. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, roughly half of all countries with available data operate their prison systems above 100% of intended capacity. About one in five countries are running at more than 150%.10United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Data Matters – Prison Population
El Salvador illustrates the pattern at scale. Its system runs at roughly 163% capacity despite the construction of CECOT, one of the largest single prison facilities ever built.1World Prison Brief. El Salvador Overcrowding at that level means inadequate medical care, limited access to legal counsel, increased violence between inmates, and disease transmission. Countries that incarcerate at high rates without matching investment in prison infrastructure face these compounding crises. And in parts of Latin America the political trend is still moving toward more arrests, not fewer, with leaders in other countries openly praising El Salvador’s approach as a model worth copying.