Since the 1979 Revolution, Iran’s prison population has increased markedly. On the eve of Revolution in 1978 there were about 10,000 prisoners representing, by the international measure known as the ‘incarceration’ or ‘prison population’ rate, 25 per 100,000 of the population. Based on the Iranian Prisons Organisation’s statistics, and according to the calculation of an Iranian sociologist, by the first decade of the 2000s the incarceration rate had increased nearly ten-fold too, on average, 230 per 100,000.^[3] It is currently 284, significantly above the world median of between 144 and 155.^[4] Iran, in other words, has an exceptionally high prison population and, as explained in what follows, a prison system that is among the most overcrowded in the world.

During the period since 1979 prisoner numbers have waxed and waned. Official statistics showed a notable reduction between 1999 (when there were 190,000 prisoners) and 2004 (when there were 134, 000). But the upward trend resumed from 2005 and by 2008 the prison population had reached 168,000. By March/April 2010 it was 184,000. From there numbers spiralled: to 204,000 in August 2010,^[5] 220, 000 in March 2011, and ‘over 250,000’ in October 2011.^[6]Although the Prisons Organisation’s figures for the prison population includes temporary detainees, it is not clear how accurately they reflect actual levels of incarceration since, especially in the first half of the 2000s, members of the judiciary and the Prisons Organisation would make frequent reference to the large numbers of citizens who experienced prison each year if only, in many cases, briefly. In the early 2000s, official sources variously put the ‘transient’ prison population (those in temporary detention who are under investigation or await charges, or those sentenced to short terms in prison) at between 400,000 and 600,000 each year without making it clear what impact this group had on the overall figures for prisoners held at any one time.

By way of example, in 2001 Ayatollah Hashemi Shahrudi, the Head of the Judiciary, told a meeting of his ‘executive council’ that the ‘official figures’ for prisoners were in fact only one-fifth of the actual figure:^[7]

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC):

In statements issued in June and October 2006 the Head of the Prisons Organisation also put the spotlight on the throughput figures:

After 2008 officials have not made much reference to this transient population although in July 2013 a judiciary official stated that the rate of entry to and exit from prisons was equal,^[11] and the Minister of Justice announced in his annual report that in the course of the Iranian year 2013–2014, ‘531, 796 entered the prison system, a reduction of 4.25 percent on the previous year.’^[12]

The dramatic increase in the prison population over the three years to 2012 (26 percent/35 percent) is sometimes said to be due ‘largely to increased prosecution of drug-related crimes.’^[13] But it is misleading to attribute the growth to this factor alone since the percentage of those held in prison for narcotics offences has hardly changed since the mid-2000s – 47 percent in both 2006/7 and 2013/14, for example, with only minor variations in other annual figures I have seen.^[14] Most Iranian lawyers asked about the matter respond that another, perhaps equally important factor, is the criminalisation of numerous offences which before the 1979 Revolution, or in most other countries, are not defined as crimes (1,640 separate offences are punishable by imprisonment under the Iranian penal code).^[15] There is also, according to one judge, a regrettable tendency among lawmakers to see a prison sentence as a cure all, even in the case of minor infractions. Another point raised is that assistant prosecutors have been too fast to issue arrest warrants instead of coaxing the parties to make peace.

Through the 2000s officials repeatedly put the capacity of the prison system at 55-60,000 inmates. In 2006, according to the Prisons Organisations head, Ali Akbar Yesaqi, these consisted of 224 units – 175 prisons, 25 juvenile detention centres, 23 camps and 11 temporary detention centres. There were, he added, about 100 other detention centres administered by the security forces and the police which were not under the authority of the Prisons Organisation.

For much of this period the system was holding from just under to just over 2.5 times its capacity which was, it seems, stagnating. Plans announced in 2001 for prison reconstruction, aimed at creating new capacity and removing prisons from the centre of cities had not progressed, causing Yesaqi to lament that, “Some of our prisons are in a state of extreme decay having functioned for more than half a century. Promises have been made in this connection and efforts have been undertaken. But if the trend of reconstruction proceeds at its present pace it will take another half century for the renovation of those prisons which require it to be completed.”^[16] Another highly placed official to remark on this scenario was the Prosecutor General Ayatollah Dorri Najafabadi who in May 2007 observed that “The situation in some of the country’s prisons is so bad that prison officials themselves have difficulty in tolerating it.” He added that on each trip to the provinces he would inspect the local jails. “Go and look at conditions in our provincial jails. This is Tehran where conditions in the jails are better. It is not the same elsewhere [in the country] …The Juvenile Correction Centre of Tehran was built forty years ago and has a capacity of 200-400 but our needs are far greater than this.”^[17]

By 2008 official capacity figures had risen to 65,000 but so too had the prison population, giving an occupancy rate of 243.1 percent which, according to World Prison Brief (WPB) data, ranked the Iranian system as the 9th most overcrowded in the world.^[18]In May 2011, the WPB put the prison occupancy rate at 258.8 percent quoting an expanded capacity of 85,000 but again a much higher prison population.^[19] By December 2011, when the number of prisoners reached 250,000, and the occupancy rate 294.1 percent –a little less than thee times the system’s capacity – the WPB ranked the Iranian system the fourth most overcrowded in the world, a hair’s breadth behind the Philippines which the International Centre for Prison Studies estimated had an occupancy rate of ‘circa 300 percent.’^[20]

The rapid rise in prisoner numbers over this period was not just combined with an acute shortage of space but also deteriorating financial resources, according to the head of the Prisons Organisation (Qolam Hossein Esmaili) and prison governors around the country, who in 2011 issued statement after statement confirming the growing crisis. Esmaili told the press that in the first two months of 1390 (April/May 2011) the Prisons Organisation budget had not been paid, forcing it to take huge sums in credit from the bazaar simply to feed detainees.^[21] Earlier a Ministry of Health official had declared that it had not been provided with the necessary resources to guarantee health standards and control infectious diseases in the prisons.^[22] And in a parliamentary debate in April Younes Mousavi, a member of the Majles judicial affairs commission said the annual budget of the Prisons Organisation did not even cover the cost of food and clothing, adding: “The prisons are facing so many difficulties that every two prisoners have to share a blanket.” Mousavi said the removal of government subsidies on energy means utility bills have surged, so that the annual prison budget is just enough to cover their water, electricity and gas needs. He proposed reducing water and electricity tariffs for prisons, but parliament did not agree.^[23]

A month later another member of the Judicial Commission, Ezatollah Yousefian, said in a report on the welfare of prisoners published by Sharq newspaper that overall the country’s prisons held four times their capacity and that a few were holding eight times.^[24] Other leading officials admitted the crisis, though they quoted rather lower occupancy rates. For example, the Deputy Head of the Judiciary in Charge of Crime Prevention said on 9 October 2011 that overall the system accommodated three times its capacity,^[25] a figure also cited by the then Head of the National Inspectorate, Mostafa Pourmohammadi. Pourmohammadi confirmed that the government had neglected to build new prisons.^[26]

Data on individual prisons is not often made available, but what we have from a combination of official and civil society sources shows that overcrowding is significant in many major prisons with estimates ranging from almost three to as much as six times capacity.^[27] For example, in November 2011, Vakilabad Prison, Mashhad, with a nominal capacity of 3,000 was holding around 13,000 inmates according to a judiciary official.^[28] In 2010, Rajai Shahr prison with a maximum capacity of 90 prisoners held 1,100;^[29] Qezel Hessar prison in Karaj, the largest in Iran, held 20,000 prisoners, more than three times its capacity according to the Head of the Alborz Prisons Administration in May 2011;^[30] Tabriz Prison, with a capacity to hold around 2,000 had more than 6,000 prisoners in 2010 according to an inmate, a figure later confirmed by the prison governor; Isfahan with a capacity of 1,000 has 4,000 prisoners, and at times more according to judiciary officials in a September 2013 newspaper interview,^[31] Langaroud Prison, Qom with a capacity of 1,200 according to the Head of the Qom Prisons Administration had more than 4000 prisoners in November 2011.^[32]

Already in its 2005/06 report, filed when numbers were much lower, the now banned domestic NGO, the Association for the Defence of Prisoner’s Rights, concluded that ‘Despite certain improvements in comparison with previous years, we consider the overall conditions in prisons to be inappropriate and very far from acknowledged legal and human rights standards.’^[33]

Up until early 2009, the human reality of the situation of ordinary prisoners was occasionally attested in reports from political prisoners housed in the same wards, often by way of punishment. Many more emerged from prisons around the country following the June 2009 presidential election and the widespread arrests of civil society and political activists which followed.^[34] These reports speak of prisoners having to sleep on the floor, in corridors and in courtyards, appalling sanitary facilities, inadequate food, medical neglect, high levels of violence outside the control of, and sometimes encouraged by guards, sexual abuse and so on. Since they were written and smuggled out of prisons at substantial personal risk by, in all cases, known political prisoners, there is no reason to disbelieve them.

The Judiciary has responded to the crisis of 2011 by attempting, on the one hand, to reduce the prison population, and on the other, to increase prison capacity. Additions to its building stock since numbers began to grow reportedly include two camps for drug addicts, now on-stream, in which conditions are to be intentionally ‘hard.’ Another three are said to be in the process of construction. The new ’greater Tehran prison’ near Qom, long in the pipeline, is still only partially in operation and it appears that no more than 6,000 prisoners have so far been transferred to it.^[35] An expanded woman’s prison for Tehran province at Qarchak near Varamin, apparently a ‘refurbished’ building billed as an expanded and modernised premises acquired notoriety soon after women prisoners of conscience were transferred there in the Spring of 2011.^[36] They found it contained ‘subhuman’ conditions: seven wards, each with a capacity of 100 inmates but each holding close to 300 prisoners and served by only two toilets and two showers, water that could not be used to clean teeth, the poorest possible quality of food and so on.^[37]

The releases – which have been through pardons, generous amnesties for prisoners who are non-violent, and resolution, by various devices, of the situation of prisoners held because they are unable to pay blood money (diyeh) incurred as a result of unintentional injury – can be followed through various press reports. According to the Prisons Organisation the population of its jails were reduced in this way by 33,000 in a single year to 217,000 (official Iranian government figure for December 2012 sent to the World Prison Brief). Since then it appears to have remained steady with the latest figure announced in June 2014 being 217, 851, 3.5 percent less than ‘last year’.^[38]