- Who
- Silivri Penitentiaries Campus
- Where
- Türkiye (Istanbul)
- When
The largest prison in the world is the Silivri Penitentiaries Campus (Silivri Ceza İnfaz Kurumları Kampüsü, better known simply as Silivri Prison), located in the north-western suburbs of Istanbul, Turkey. The prison complex was designed to house around 11,000 inmates when it was opened in 2008, but a Turkish parliamentary investigation in November 2019 found that the population had risen to 22,781.
Other extremely large prisons include Riker's Island Jail in New York, USA, which had a pre-COVID average population of about 10,000 inmates on any given day (down from around 14,000 at its peak) and the Tihar Jail Complex in Delhi, India, which has a population of 12,106 inmates as of Dec 2019. The Delhi prison system as a whole (including the Rohini and Mandoli prison complexes) has a population of 17,534 and a official capacity of 10,026.
Another facility that is often mentioned in discussions of record-breaking prison populations is LA County Jail, which had an average daily population of almost 20,000 before the COVID-19 pandemic. The LA Country Jail figures are for the entire prison system administered by the LA County Sheriff's Department, which comprises seven facilities spread across the city and its outskirts.
