Cypriot prisons record the third highest levels of overcrowding among the 47 member states of the Council of Europe, housing 127 inmates for every 100 available places.
According to the Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics (SPACE) for 2016, there are 668 inmates in Cyprus, when total prison capacity cannot exceed 528. There are 78,7 prisoners for every 100.000 inhabitants.
At the same time, European prisons are on average close to full capacity, with inmates occupying over 9 out of ten available places.
According to a CoE announcement, the incarceration rate grew from 115.7 to 117.1 inmates per 100,000 inhabitants from 2015 to 2016. This rate had previously fallen every year since 2012, when it reached 125.6 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants.
The countries where the incarceration rate grew the most were Bulgaria (+10.8%), Turkey (+9.5%), the Czech Republic (+7.6%), Serbia (+6.6%) and Denmark (+5.5%). The prison administrations where it fell the most were Iceland (-15.9%), Northern Ireland (-11.8), Lithuania (-11.1%), Belgium (-10.1%) and Georgia (-6.7%).
On the other hand, overcrowding remained a serious problem in many countries. Thirteen out of 47 prison administrations reported having more inmates than places to host them. The highest levels of overcrowding were observed in “The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” (132 prisoners per 100 places available), Hungary (132), Cyprus (127), Belgium (120), France (117), Portugal (109), Italy (109), Serbia (109), Albania (108), the Czech Republic (108), Romania (106) and Turkey (103).
Over one fourth of all sentenced prisoners (26.4%) were serving sentences of one to three years. The percentage of prisoners serving sentences of more than 10 years grew from 11.4% to 13%.
Theft once again became the crime for which most offenders were held in custody (18.9%), with drug offences being the second most common offence for which people were incarcerated in 2016(17.5%), followed by robbery (12.6%) and homicide (12.1%).
Daily expenditure per inmate continued to vary greatly across Europe. Overall, the 44 prison administrations which provided this information spent €51 per inmate per day in 2015. In 2015, the 44 prison administrations that provided this data for the survey spent a total of more than €18 billion.
The SPACE survey is conducted for the Council of Europe by the University of Lausanne. Liechtenstein, Russia, Ukraine, and two of the three Bosnia and Herzegovina Administrations did not participate in the survey.