Following its inaugural release,
the second edition of Prison Matters continues to present a comprehensive global overview of the latest global prison statistics and emerging trends, with a special focus on rehabilitative prison environments. Relying on data collected annually through the United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (UN-CTS), Prison Matters explores prison population estimates, including pretrial detention, as well as the state of overcrowding, prison personnel and custodial deaths and offers valuable insights into the state of incarceration worldwide.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) oversees the UN-CTS, an annual questionnaire that facilitates the collection of data on crime trends and criminal justice systems, including prison population statistics, from Member States. To strengthen data coverage and reliability, UNODC integrates supplementary sources, ensuring the production of robust regional and global prison population estimates.
First outlined in the Kyoto Declaration on “Advancing Crime Prevention, Criminal Justice and the Rule of Law: Towards the Achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”, which was adopted as a result of the 14th UN Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice1, this year’s Prison Matters explores the concept of rehabilitative prison environments and illustrates efforts from Member States aimed at translating this concept into practice.
The research brief includes the essential points of view of prisoners, prison staff and prison management from field studies that UNODC conducted between 2019 and 2025 in Albania, Australia, Czechia, Namibia and Thailand to understand the nexus between rehabilitation, social reintegration and reoffending. As such, this publication also reflects the UN Model Strategies on Reducing Reoffending (the Kyoto Model Strategies) as the latest addition to the UN standards norms related to prison management and the treatment of offenders, which the 34th session of the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice recommended for adoption by the General Assembly in May 2025.
