Since the year 2000, the World Prison Brief of the Institute for Criminal Policy Research has recorded comprehensive details of the use of imprisonment around the world. Country by country, it has recorded the total number of prisoners and the rate of imprisonment per 100,000 of the national population as well as proportions of pre-trial/remand, women, juvenile and foreign national prisoners. It has also recorded details of the prison administration, the number of penal institutions, the capacity of the prison system and the rate of occupancy. More recently it has provided data on trends in the use of imprisonment over previous years as well as news and reports on prison conditions in each country. The Brief also includes tables of several data sets showing each country’s position relative to others in the same continent as well as elsewhere in the world. All of this information, collated from reliable sources, is freely available on the World Prison Brief website.1 The present book brings these data together in a single publication along with an analysis of key features of the use of imprisonment, some of which are common to all countries and others of which demonstrate diversity in penal policies and practices in different parts of the world.

One of the main aims of the World Prison Brief is to facilitate evidence-based discussion about the realities of imprisonment around the world and thereby to support improvement of prison systems in accordance with international human rights standards. This volume is intended to contribute to that discussion by explaining how these standards help to create the essential ethical framework for the use of imprisonment and for the way that prisons are managed and prisoners are treated. It has argued that these standards, which have been freely agreed by the international community, are an articulation of universal human values. The book provides a detailed consideration of how the standards can be applied to all aspects of the treatment of prisoners and has discussed some of the challenges posed to the implementation of such an approach, not least in the increasingly insecure and unstable world of today.

Almost from the inception of the modern version of the prison in the late eighteenth century, there have been attempts to reform it.