May 17, 2019
For several years, Iran’s Judiciary has preached the need to find alternatives to incarceration, saying jail isn’t necessarily the best response to crime—but in reality the number of prisoners behind bars in Iran has now risen to a record high, according to official figures.
As of last September, Iran was detaining 230,000 people, including both those being held after arrest for investigation and those serving prison terms after trial.
That was the ninth largest number of prisoners in any of 223 prison systems tabulated by the British-based International Center for Prison Studies.
The more important statistic, however, is the rate of imprisonment—that is, the number of prisoners per 100,000 population.
By that measure, Iran ranks 36th in the world. But two-thirds of the countries above Iran are in the Americas, where imprisonment rates are often quite high. And a third of those with higher rates than Iran are small Caribbean island nations.
In Western Asia, Iran’s imprisonment rate of 284 is only exceeded by the Maldives, a small island nation with a rate of 499, and Turkmenistan, with a rate of 552.
The center got its figures for most countries from the countries themselves. But it got no figures from North Korea, Somalia and Eritrea and said its numbers from China and Guinea Bissau were incomplete.
The single nation with the highest number of prisoners and the highest rate of imprisonment by far is the United States. As of last September, the US was holding 2.1 million prisoners, most in state prisons and county jails rather than federal prisons. And its rate of incarceration was 655 per 100,000 population, well ahead of second place El Salvador (604) and third-place Turkmenistan (552). Jurisdictions in the United States were holding almost one-fifth of those jailed by governments throughout the world.
The global average rate of imprisonment is 145 per 100,000 population. In Europe, it is 81—just one-eighth the American rate and less than one-third the Iranian rate.
For a long time, Iran was holding between 150,000 and 190,000 prisoners, but the numbers fell markedly to 134,384 in 2005, according to the center’s report. Since then, however, the numbers have soared, reaching 204,365 in 2010, 225,624 in 2014 and 230,000 in 2018.
