Turkey has more than doubled its prison construction rate compared to four years before the failed coup of July 2016, analyst Noah Blaser said in Foreign Policy on Sunday.
Satellite imagery revealed construction on 131 prisons beginning between July 2016 and March 2021, Blaser wrote, compared to the 64 prisons were observed under construction.
In the aftermath of the failed putsch that Turkey blames on Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim cleric living in self-imposed exile in the United States, the country announced a two-year-long state of emergency, granting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan powers to dismiss hundreds of thousands of public servants, military personnel and arresting tens of thousands of dissidents.
“A massive expansion of the country’s prison network is abetting that crackdown and its accompanying human rights abuses,” Blaser said.
Turkish Justice Ministry’s documents and press reports indicate that nearly 100 additional facilities are under consideration by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, he said.
Prisons have grown in size as well as in number, according to Blaser.
“The floorspace of prisons built after 2016 increased by an average of 50 percent when compared to the previous period,” he said.
“Turkey’s government has made no secret of its prison-building spree. Yet a closer look reveals the unprecedented scale of its efforts, which include sprawling facilities rising in remote corners of the country, a plan to build one of the largest prison complexes in the world, and a massive overall increase in the government’s capacity to punish dissent,” Blaser wrote.
“Featuring towering concrete walls, guard towers, and rows of narrow courtyards running along their interior, 75 of the post-coup facilities viewed by Foreign Policy were built as maximum-security facilities,” he said, adding that the remaining 56 were built as minimum-security prisons.
The post-coup construction is set to increase the total capacity of Turkey’s prisons by more than 70 percent, to at least 320,000 from around 180,000 in 2016, according to the article.
“Government sources place the cost at between 11.2 billion and 13 billion lira ($1.3 billion to $1.5 billion), Blaser said.
Despite the two amnesties since 2016,today the official prison population sits at nearly 288,000, far exceeding Turkey’s current prison capacity of around 250,000, Blaser added.
To accommodate the incredible surge in new prisoners since the failed coup, Turkey has released around 190,000 non-political prisoners in two separate amnesties.
“Prisoners of conscience have been barred from release even under the COVID-19 amnesty, with pro-democracy philanthropist Osman Kavala and pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party ( HDP) co-leader Selahattin Demirtaş remaining imprisoned, despite international outcry,” he said.
Around 4,000 HDP members which are allegedly linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a group that is in armed conflict with Turkey since launching an insurgency aimed at Kurdish self-rule in 1984,remain behind bars, including nine members of the parliament, he added.
“Violent offenders, meanwhile, have been let go, with opposition media chronicling a rash of femicides and domestic violence by inmates released in 2020.”
In 2020, Turkey’s incarceration rate ranked highest among all 47 European Council member states, Blaser said, citing the Council’s annual penal statistics on populations report.
Ahval