Crime
Two series on crime and punishment: the world homicide rate and the world prison population rate.
Reading them together shows that the amount of crime and the use of punishment do not line up. A high incarceration rate often reflects how much a justice system chooses to prosecute and imprison rather than how dangerous a country is. Note that both rankings keep the top 30 by latest value, so countries with the world's lowest rates — Japan and South Korea among them — do not appear in either table.
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Useful
Prison Population Rate by Country (1997–2025)
Sovereign rows of the World Prison Brief “Prison population per 100,000 of the national population” series via Our World in Data. Top 30 by most recent year. Aggregates…
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Useful
Homicide Rate by Country (1990–2023)
Sovereign rows of the UNODC “Intentional homicide rate per 100,000 population” series via Our World in Data. Top 30 by most recent year. Aggregates excluded. About this ranking…