Gürsel Tekin's prison statement: "Is it really a terrible situation?"

14 Ağu 16:47

The best thing is to compare it with the US, honestly. Over there the prisons are always “full,” almost 2 million people are behind bars. But theirs is a completely different, unbelievably profitable system. Private companies run the prisons, and they make money by keeping sentences long. So the capacity issue exists in the US too, but it’s not just about the budget—since the whole system is profit‑driven, changing the situation is never easy. In Turkey, I think it’s also a political choice: the phrase “full throttle” isn’t used for nothing. Keeping more people in jail gives the impression of a “strong state” to the public. Instead of expanding capacity, they hide the problem. Globally there are two models: the first is the US‑style profit‑oriented system, the second is the Northern‑European model; there they focus on reintegrating people into society rather than just punishing them, so their prisons aren’t packed. So, in my view, the deep cause isn’t just money, but political will and how the system works. An alternative that comes to mind is to speed up the judiciary and increase pre‑prison supervision. For example, Sweden shut down its prisons at the end of the 2000s, introduced alternative sanctions, and now its capacity is empty. In Turkey, however, the judiciary has turned into a snake‑story, and that’s the root of the problem.