Roughly 170,000 inmates are currently held in Iranian prisons, out of which some 5,000 are women, said the head of Iran's prison organization, Morteza Bakhtiari, on Monday.
Bakhtiari said about 68,000 were serving terms for drug trafficking and some 32,000 for drug addiction, the official Iranian news agency IRNA quoted him as saying.
He said about 16,000 were behind bars on bad check-related offenses, including 114 women.
“There are as many as 2,500 prisoners held on charges of fraud,” said Bakhtiari.
Currently, some 5,000 prisoners under eighteen years old are being kept in special correction centers designated for juveniles, he pointed out.
Bakhtiari, said IRNA, proposed suspending punishment for first-time offenders and changing the prison terms for other kinds of crimes as possible solutions to bring the number of prisoners down – Albawaba.com
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