Families of Prisoners Support Group

This community is dedicated to families that have been disrupted by prison. A prison, penitentiary, or correctional facility is a place in which individuals are physically confined or interned and usually deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Prisons are conventionally institutions which form part of the criminal justice system of a country, such that imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime.

As of 2006, it is estimated that at least nine million people are currently imprisoned worldwide. It is believed that this number is likely to be much higher, in view of general under-reporting and a lack of data from various countries, especially authoritarian regimes. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the prison population in most countries has increased significantly.

In absolute terms, the United States currently has the largest inmate population in the world, with more than 2 million in prison and jails. In 2002, both Russia and China also had prison populations in excess of 1 million.