Hungary had the highest number of people imprisoned per 100,000 people in the European Union, according to Eurostat. 193 people out of 100,000 were incarcerated that year.
Hungary is followed by Poland with 191 inmates per 100,000 people, then Latvia with 187. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, Finland had the lowest incarceration rate with 57 inmates per 100,000 people, followed by the Netherlands (67/100,000 people) and Denmark (70/100,000 people). The overall EU average was 113 per 100,000 people imprisoned in 2024.
The increase has been attributed to a prison-centred criminal justice approach adopted in 2010, marked by measures such as the ‘three strikes’ law against repeat offenders and a decline in alternative sentencing options, according to the Hungarian news outlet 24.hu.
Prison overcrowding reached its highest point in 2013, when facilities operated at 144 per cent of capacity nationwide, leading to compulsory legal reforms and compensation programmes over inadequate detention conditions, the Budapest Business Journal (BBJ) writes. To address capacity shortages, the government expanded prisons through rapid container-unit construction.
Hungary also has one of the lowest crime rates in the European Union.
According to the Global Organized Crime Index (GOCI) developed by the Geneva, Switzerland-based NGO Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Hungary had an overall criminality score of just 4.6 in 2025. That is the tenth lowest among EU Member States, after Finland (3.3), Estonia (3.9), Latvia (4.1), Lithuania (also 4.1), Austria (4.3), Slovenia (also 4.3), Czechia (4.5), and Cyprus (also 4.5).
In the crime index, Hungary is far ahead of Western European nations with high levels of migration from Muslim-majority countries in recent years, such as Italy (6.4), Spain (6.0), France (5.9), or the Netherlands (5.2).
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