A Ten-fold Increase in the Number of Prisoners Since 1979

Hamid Ahadi, Rooz Online:

The head of Iran's prisons organization recently announced that the number of prisoners in Iran has increased ten times since the 1979 revolution. This announcement comes at a time when Akbar Ganji's five year sentence will end in three weeks and the 21-year-old Elham Afroutan remains imprisoned in Iran's notorious prisons. Afroutan had unknowingly published a satirical article in a publication in the Hormozegan province. READ MORE

The head of the prison organization said that since 1979, the number of prisoners had increased by ten times while the country's population had merely doubled. The shocking news comes amid regular media reports of armed robberies and hooliganism that have been growing in recent years. He believes the solution is in reforming and balancing the country's regulations. He specifically mentions and supports a bill to confront drug addicts that is currently before the Majlis (Iranian parliament).

In 1979, Iran had 13,000 prisoners. In 1978, some 411 political prisoners had been released and the non-political prisoners that had been released on bail returned to prison in the early days of the revolution. At that time the founder of the Islamic Republic had promised that prisons would be turned into schools, while revolutionary's announcements said that Iran had some 100,000 political prisoners. After the revolution, it was revealed that the number of prisoners in Iran was not even 20 percent of the claimed figure. The Iran’s monarchy at different times put the figure of its political prisoners at 2,000. But by the time the revolution overthrew the monarchy, there were only 650 political prisoners in prisons who were released.

After the revolution, Ayatollah Taleghani suggested that the notorious Evin prison be turned into a museum or a park. Six months after that proposal, Evin was handed over to the Revolutionary Prosecutor’s Office. By the summer of 1981, Evin was filled with an unprecedented 10,000 political-prisoners. Since then, it has kept its world's notoriety while it is regularly mentioned by hundreds of human rights groups and in political literature.

Even though the number of political prisoners in Iran is now the lowest it has ever been in the Islamic Republic, the international outcry over Iran’s political prisoner situation has not changed. The imprisonment of prominent student activists, journalists, clerics, etc has kept the Evin’s notoriety at its peak and alive.

The dead of Iran's judiciary has repeatedly stressed on the necessity of reducing the number of prisoners and has criticized the sentences of judges for temporary imprisonment of individuals. But even his recommendations have not been put into action. Political experts believe that the recommendations of the head of the judiciary were not for political or ideological prisoners and that his suggestion was limited to ordinary prisoners and criminals. The Islamic Republic is known to have among the worlds largest number of prisoners.