Everything you want to know about prisons…

Prisons can be an emotive subject and it’s important that governments, researchers, policy makers, pressure groups and others all base their views on the facts. The Ministry of Justice publishes a range of regular statistical bulletins and reports with up-to-date information, often underpinned by publicly available datasets. These can, however, not always be straightforward to access if you’re not used to MoJ systems. Therefore, I’ve constructed this compendium of prison information which will be updated when the latest statistics are published.

You can either browse the whole collection of slides (see further down this page) or follow the links in the bullet points below to go to individual charts.

• Search for any prison by name and see when it was founded, what sort of prison it is (local, trainer etc.), who it serves (gender and adult/YOI), when it was founded, its capacity and whether it is publicly or privately run.
• See the annual cost per prison place in every establishment in England and Wales 
• Look at the age of our prison estate and see the date that every prison was opened 
• See the average annual prison population every year since 1900 
• Follow the rise in the average annual MALE prison population every year since 1900 
• Survey the fluctuations in the average annual FEMALE prison population every year since 1900 
• See the changes in prison staffing since 2010, including information by different bands 
• Examine the correlations between staffing levels, self harm & assaults
• Examine the rates of self harm in prison (broken down by gender) since 2004 
• Analyse the number of assaults in prison (broken down by gender) since 2000 
• See the number of deaths in prison (broken down by natural, self-inflicted, homicide) since 2009 
• See the number of male deaths in prison 
• Examine the number of female deaths in prison 
• See the overall ethnic composition of our prison population
• See the ethnic breakdown of every establishment

You can also see the latest prison population numbers (updated weekly) with the most up-to-date COVID data here.

If you can’t see the visualisation below on your device, you can find it here.

Compendium last updated 14 August 2023