Turkey’s prison population has climbed above 427,000, exceeding official capacity by more than 122,000 people and pushing occupancy to roughly 140 percent, the Stockholm Center for Freedom reported, citing Justice Ministry data.
As of July 1, Turkey held 427,525 pretrial detainees and convicted prisoners in facilities built for 304,956. The population has grown by 14,534 since March 1 — from 412,991 to 421,583 by June 1, then by another 5,942 in June alone.
The surge reflects a wave of arrests over protests against the jailing of İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s main political rival, along with continuing crackdowns on the faith-based Gülen movement, inspired by the late Turkish-Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, and on people associated with the Kurdish political movement.
Overcrowding has steadily eroded living conditions. The average area per convicted prisoner, excluding sports halls and exercise yards, fell from 29.2 square meters in 2023 to 24.6 in 2024 and 24 by the end of 2025.
Turkey’s inmate population now exceeds that of 34 of the country’s 81 provinces, among them Amasya, Rize, Yalova and Artvin.
The government’s response has centered on building more capacity rather than reducing the number of prisoners. Enis Yavuz Yıldırım, the then-head of the prison directorate, told a parliamentary subcommittee on prisoners’ rights in February that 50 new prisons would be built by the end of 2028 and that some older facilities considered unsuitable for a modern penal system would be closed.
The strain extends beyond prison walls. Criminal trials now take an average of 248 days and civil cases 243, while each prosecutor handles close to 1,500 case files.
Council of Europe figures show Turkey is not merely above the European average but an outlier on nearly every key indicator. The 2025 SPACE I report recorded 392,456 inmates in Turkey on January 31, 2025 — the highest total among the 51 prison administrations covered. Its prison population rate of 458.1 per 100,000 inhabitants was also the highest in the report, more than four times the European median of 110.1.
Turkey posted the sharpest year-on-year rise in imprisonment as well, with its rate climbing 29 percent between January 2024 and January 2025 — ahead of Montenegro at 22 percent, Luxembourg at 20 percent, Sweden at 15 percent, Greece at 14 percent and Croatia at 11 percent.
The pattern holds in the report’s adjusted figures, which exclude certain categories of inmates to make cross-country comparisons more consistent. Turkey’s adjusted population of 386,271, a rate of 450.9 per 100,000, again topped the table, far above the European adjusted median of 108.0 and the average of 119.7.
The Council of Europe also put Turkey in the “very high” category — defined as more than 25 percent above the European median — for both prison density, the number of inmates per 100 available places, and the ratio of inmates per staff member, a further sign of strain on the system.