Turkey can't build prisons fast enough to house convict influx
Turkey has incarcerated so many people on terror and drug-related charges that its prisoner population far exceeds its capacity and overcrowding has become a thorny issue.
Turkey's prisons are overflowing, and not just with the usual suspects. Thousands of minors, including hundreds under the age of three, are spending their childhood behind bars.
Saban Yilmaz, Turkey's director general of prisons and houses of detention, shared some striking information Nov. 14 on the state of the prison system during a recent meeting of the parliament’s human rights commission. He was responding to widespread allegations of overcrowding and miserable conditions because of mass detentions and a sharp increase in prison populations after the 2016 coup attempt.
In his address, Yilmaz said that as of that day, there were 385 prisons in Turkey, 78 of them with minimum security. Yilmaz said the prisons today have a total capacity of 220,000, while the number of prisoners is 260,000, despite the government building 79 prisons in the past five years to house a total of 66,000 detainees. The Ministry of Justice is planning to build 228 more prisons and create a capacity for an additional 140,000 inmates in the next five years.
Yilmaz said the prisons hold 743 mothers and about 3,000 children below 15, including 343 aged three and under.
