Three measures across 183 countries, from 1990.
Source: UNODC and the World Prison Brief, via Our World in Data. Homicide is the only crime statistic comparable across countries — a death is recorded whatever the reporting culture, whereas theft, assault and sexual violence figures track willingness to report and police recording practice at least as much as underlying incidence. That is why no general crime rate appears here: recorded crime is not comparable between countries, and a map of it would produce confident colour where no comparison exists. UNODC reports with a two to three year lag, so the most recent years are thinly covered. Prison population has no common reporting year at all — each country is updated whenever its national statistics appear — so that view shows each country's most recent reading, with the year given on hover. It measures state action rather than criminality, and the two are less related than intuition suggests.
You will not find a general crime rate on this map, and the omission is deliberate.
Recorded crime is not comparable between countries. It depends on what a jurisdiction criminalises, whether victims report, and whether police record what is reported. Sweden’s recorded sexual offence rate dwarfs Egypt’s — not because Swedish women are less safe, but because Sweden counts each incident separately and reporting confidence is high. Theft statistics track insurance penetration as much as theft.
UNODC publishes national crime figures and states plainly that they should not be compared across countries. A world map of recorded crime would produce confident colour where no comparison exists, and readers would draw conclusions the data cannot support.
Homicide is the exception. A body is difficult to leave unrecorded, definitions vary far less, and the measure is robust to reporting culture. This is why serious cross-country work on violence uses homicide and largely ignores everything else.
Homicide is overwhelmingly a male phenomenon — men are both the majority of victims and the large majority of perpetrators, in almost every country.
That makes the aggregate rate largely a measure of male violence in public space: gang conflict, organised crime, disputes between strangers or acquaintances. It responds to policing, drug markets and economic conditions.
The female victim rate behaves differently. Women are far more often killed by partners or family members, in private, which means the rate tracks domestic violence rather than public criminality. A country can reduce its overall homicide rate substantially while the female rate barely moves, because the two have different causes and respond to different interventions.
Switching between the two views shows where that divergence is largest.
The third view is included precisely because it does not measure criminality.
Imprisonment rates reflect sentencing policy, pre-trial detention practice, drug law, and political attitudes to punishment. Countries with similar homicide rates can differ fivefold in how many people they imprison.
Comparing the two views makes that visible. Some high-imprisonment countries have high violence; others do not. The relationship is far weaker than public debate assumes, and where it appears strong, causation runs in contested directions.
Small countries produce volatile rates. A country of 100,000 people moves several points on the per-100,000 scale from a handful of deaths. Treat year-to-year movement in small states as noise.
Reporting lags vary. Some countries report homicide within a year; others take three or more. The hover panel labels the year where a country’s latest reading differs from the one selected.
Homicide excludes conflict deaths. UNODC counts intentional homicide, not deaths in armed conflict — those are on the armed conflict map. A country at war can show a modest homicide rate alongside tens of thousands of conflict deaths.
Trends matter more than levels. The hover panel gives each country’s change since 1990. Several countries with high rates today have fallen substantially; others with moderate rates have risen.
Data from UNODC and the World Prison Brief, via Our World in Data.