Justice Minister Abdülhamit Gül has announced that Turkey, which has been witnessing mass arrests since a failed coup in July 2016, has constructed 94 more prisons over the past five years, with close to 300,000 inmates currently in these prisons, Turkish media outlets reported.
Responding to a parliamentary question about prison statistics submitted by an opposition deputy, Republican People’s Party (CHP) deputy Ömer Fethi Gürer, Gül said there are currently 355 prisons in the country.
The country’s prison population comprises 232,342 people who were convicted of crimes and 48,452 others who are jailed pending trial.
Following the coup attempt, the Turkish government launched a massive crackdown on non-loyalist citizens under the pretext of an anti-coup fight, as a result of which more than 130,000 people were removed from state jobs while in excess of 25,000 others are still in prison and some 600,000 people have been investigated on allegations of terrorism.