While Portugal fared poorly, overcrowding has been slowly declining in European prisons since 2011, although it remains a problem in one in four prison administrations, the Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics (SPACE) said.
Portugal was among the top ten, placed behind Hungary, Belgium, Macedonia, Greece, Albania, Spain, France and Slovenia.
The Council of Europe classifies a country’s prisons as being overcrowded when they have a ratio of more than 110 prisoners for every 100 spaces.
Back in 2013, Portugal’s capacity stood at 117, dropping to 111 a year later.
The average for the 47 European nations surveyed stood at 94 prisoners per 100 spaces.
Portugal also performed poorly with regard to the duration of prison terms, with a duration of 29.2 months, a figure beaten only by Moldova.
The Portuguese prison population in 2014 included a share of 17.6 percent of foreigners, while six percent were women.
The average age of an inmate in Portugal is 36.
Every inmate in Portugal currently costs the taxpayer 41.45 euros per day, which is substantially lower than the average of 99 euros spent on prisoners elsewhere in Europe.
On a European level, the ratio of prisoners fell from 99 inmates for every 100 places in 2011 to 96 inmates per 100 places in 2013, and then to 94 in 2014.
The prison population rate also decreased by seven percent in 2014 in relation to the previous year, and was down from 134 to 124 inmates per 100,000 inhabitants.
European prisons remained however close to the top of their capacity, holding just over 1.6 million people.
Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland said upon releasing the findings that “Overcrowding creates enormous obstacles to rehabilitating offenders and thus to better protecting society from crime. It can also breach human rights”, adding: “States still affected should do more to eradicate it, including applying alternative measures to imprisonment”.
During 2014 there were 1,212,479 individuals under the supervision of agencies in charge of alternative measures to imprisonment such as probation, community services, curfew orders or electronic monitoring in the 45 countries that provided this kind of information for the survey. Only 6.7 percent of them were awaiting trial, which shows that non-custodial measures are still seldom used instead of pre-trial detention.
In 2014 foreign inmates represented an average of 21.7 percent of the total prison population, with just over a third of these being EU citizens. In most Central and Eastern European countries, the proportion of foreign inmates did not exceed ten percent, but in Southern and Western Europe foreigners were over represented in comparison with the total population, their percentage ranging from 25 to 96 percent of the prison population.
Drug offences remained the crime for which most offenders were held in custody (16.5 percent), followed by theft (14 percent), robbery (13.1 percent) and homicide (12.3 percent).