and now stands at 220,000, by far the highest number since the government began releasing figures 17 years ago.
The number of prisoners was placed at 220,000 by Prosecutor General Gholam-Hossain Mohseni-Ejai last Thursday. That was an 8 percent jump in just the last five months and an immense 35 percent hike in the 21 months since the figure was put at 163,000 in May 2009.
Ejai suggested the sudden jump was the result of prosecutors keeping men in jail who had been charged with minor offenses but not yet tried. It is not due to the political protests after the June 2009 elections; even critics of the regime only claim there are at best a few thousand political prisoners, more likely some hundreds, not tens of thousands.
According to figures released over the years, the prison population has changed as follows:
Apr 94 91,000
Jun 96 110,000
Mar 97 137,528
Nov 98 160,000
Aug 99 185,000
Nov 00 157,000
Mar 01 164,470
Aug 01 170,000
Aug 02 168,464
Jun 04 136,160
Jun 05 132,564
Jan 06 137,875
Apr 07 147,000
May 09 163,000
Sep 10 204,000
Mar 11 220,000
The prison population rose rapidly while Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi was chairman of the Judiciary in the 1990s, but fell a quarter after Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi-Shahrudi took over in August 1999 and expressed his unhappiness with the scale of imprisonment.
Shahrudi left the post when his second term ended in August 2009, and the new chairman of the Judiciary, Sadeq Larijani, has presided over the recent jump.
The prison population bottomed out at 132,600 in 2005, but has risen two-thirds in the six years since then. Officials have given no explanation, but the one seeming correlation is with who heads the Judiciary.
Ejai, however, complained that prosecutors where detaining too many people awaiting trial. He said 70,000 or almost one-third of those in jail have not yet been sentenced. He called on prosecutors all across the country to take a second look at whom they are detaining. “While firmly dealing with dangerous criminals, I ask that prosecutors not detain those who do not require imprisonment,” Ejai said.
Ebrahim Raisi, the first deputy chairman of the Judiciary, agreed and said, “It is not fair for prosecutors to detain people before their crimes have been determined.”
The head of Iran’s Prison Agency, Gholam-Hossain Esmaili, confirmed the current inmate total of 220,000. But he also said the designed capacity of the country’s prisons is only 85,000, meaning that an area designed to hold 10 prisoners now holds 26.
Esmaili also said that he had too few personnel to staff the nation’s prisons. “According to international standards,” he said, “there should be one guard for every three prisoners. But we have one guard for every 13 to 14 prisoners.”
The rate of imprisonment in Iran is much less than that in the United States. In the United States, 1 of every 220 persons is in a prison or jail. Based on the latest figures, the Islamic Republic is holding about 1 of every 340 Iranians.
The number of prisoners in the United States is expected to fall dramatically in the near future, however, as the attitude to imprisonment for non-violent offensives has changed dramatically recently as state legislators look at plummeting revenues and the huge costs of incarceration.