Prisoners, annual (Europe)

Annual number of prisoners - persons held in penal institutions - for EU member states, EFTA countries and EU candidate countries. Eurostat dataset crim_pris_age ('Prisoners by age and sex'), filtered to freq=A, sex=T ('Total'), age=TOTAL ('Total'), unit=NR ('Number'). Each row is one (year, country): the total prison population, all ages and both sexes. Method: Eurostat compiles the statistics from national prison administrations; prisoner counts include convicted persons and persons held in pre-trial detention. Non-EU/EFTA/candidate series (the UK sub-national series UKC-L/UKM/UKN, Kosovo) are dropped (same licensing rule as the other Eurostat datasets). Units: number of prisoners (counts). Caveats: national definitions of penal institutions differ (some countries exclude certain detention types), so cross-country levels are less comparable than within-country trends; counts scale with population - the companion prisoner-rates dataset gives per-100,000 rates for direct comparisons. Coverage: ~37 geographic units after the geo rule, 2008 to the present, annual. Provenance: Eurostat keyless JSON-stat API, free reuse with attribution (Commission Decision 2011/833/EU) - please cite Eurostat. Primary key: (year, country_code). Join keys: country_code (ISO 3166-1 alpha-3), year. Cadence: refreshed yearly; Eurostat updates the crime statistics in spring (2026-04-29 vintage covers 2008-2024). Sample use: filter country_code='DEU' to track Germany's prison population over time.