The claim about overcrowded prisons in the EU was sparked by the Council of Europe’s annual crime statistics report. In a July 29, 2025, post the authors of the Telegram channel ZhS Premium wrote that when it comes to prisons in Western democracies — putting “democracies” in quotes — “the situation is grim, and there’s no real solution on the horizon.”
"The European Union is a prison of nations! As of late January 2024, Europe had more than a million inmates. The average rate was 105 prisoners per 100,000 people."
The numbers cited in the post are accurate, but they refer to 46 Council of Europe member states — not the 27 countries in the EU.
On average, Europe does have 105 prisoners per 100,000 people. The highest rates are in Turkey and Azerbaijan — hardly Western democracies — with more than 300 and 200 inmates per 100,000 people, respectively. The lowest prison populations are in Iceland and Liechtenstein. The latter, with a population of just over 40,000 residents, has only eight inmates in the entire country.
The Council of Europe’s report also notes that prisons in a third of European countries are overcrowded. The most densely populated facilities are in Slovenia, Cyprus and France. Yet all three countries rank at or below the European average when it comes to the number of inmates. That likely says more about lacking prison infrastructure than about high crime rates.
In Belarus, the last official data on the prison population was published by Belstat a decade ago, in 2015. At the time, the country had about 30,000 inmates. If that figure still holds — and there’s no reason to believe Belarusian prisons have emptied out over the past five years — it would mean more than 300 inmates per 100,000 people. That puts Belarus on par with Europe’s highest rates, like Turkey and Azerbaijan, twice as high as in neighboring Lithuania, and roughly a third more than in Poland.
