The Council of Europe has published new statistics on the European prisons, including Armenia.
The overall imprisonment rate – the number of inmates per 100,000 inhabitants- remained stable in Europe from 2018 to 2019, according to the Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics for 2019.
On 31 January 2019, there were 1,540,484 inmates in the 50 prison administrations (out of 52) of the Council of Europe member states for which these data are available, which means that the overall imprisonment rate, an indicator mainly determined by the length of prison sentences, was 106 inmates per 100,000 inhabitants. In the 45 prison administrations that provided data for both 2018 and 2019 the global incarceration remained stable, with a very slight increase from 104 to 104.5 inmates per 100,000 inhabitants. The proportion of inmates not serving a final sentence also remained stable (22%).
According to the press release, there were major reductions in the incarceration rates in Armenia (-36%) and North Macedonia(-29%), followed by Iceland (-14%), Bosnia and Herzegovina (Republika Srpska) (-11%), Romania (-10%), Republic of Moldova (-8%), Russia (-8%), Azerbaijan (-7%), Norway (-7%), Latvia (-6%) and Estonia (-5%).