Turkey Frees 38,000 Convicts

Turkish President, Tayyip Erdogan, has continued with his brutal crackdown on his opponents, with a plan to empty the Britons and fill them up with tens the f thousands accused of involvement in the last coup attempt.
Wall Street Journal reports that Turkey plans a widespread early parole of convicts in a move that will free up space in its overcrowded prisons for tens of thousands of people accused of plotting a failed coup.
The move to release some 38,000 people was described by Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag as a “conditional release” of some prisoners who have two years or less of their term left to serve. It will relieve the bursting prison system, which parliamentarians and human rights groups criticized for its dire conditions even before the government’s post-coup crackdown .
Turkish authorities have been hard-pressed to find room for the 35,000 people that have been detained since the coup attempt last month that killed more than 270 people. Currently 23,400 people are in custody in connection to coup allegations, a Turkish official said Wednesday.
Only those who committed crimes before July 1, 2016, two weeks before the coup attempt, will be eligible for parole, Mr. Bozdag said. The move won’t apply to those convicted of murder, abuse, rape or terrorism, among other crimes.

“This is not an amnesty,” he said. He didn’t say when the prisoner release would come.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has blamed the coup on Turkish cleric
Fethullah Gulen, who has been living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, and his alleged followers in the civil service, police and media. Mr. Gulen denies the allegations.
Human rights groups and opposition politicians have voiced concerns over the wave of detentions immediately after the coup attempt. Soldiers and officers sympathetic to it were rounded up and detained, handcuffed in their underwear in sports halls and stadiums.
In January, well before the coup, the head of Turkey’s penitentiary system said the country only had room for another 565 inmates.

“We are in a situation in which we’ve reached almost 100% (capacity),” Enis Yavuz Yildirim said, addressing the parliament’s human rights commission.
The overcrowding before the coup had forced prisoners to sleep in prison beds in shifts as well as find room in prison libraries and toilet areas, six members of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) said in a statement earlier this month.
In the letter, the parliamentarians said they had asked that a delegation be set up to investigate growing accusations of rights abuses, including torture and beatings.
“Following the July 15 coup, human rights abuses are growing in the prison system with tens of thousands of new detainees,” the statement said.
Mr. Bozdag responded to such allegations, saying in a television interview earlier this month that there is no torture in Turkish prisons.
“It is not possible that there is torture in our jails. If such a thing has occurred, if anyone is making such a claim, they should write to the ministry, they should write their name and who did it to them and we will immediately do what is necessary,” he said in an interview posted on the Justice Ministry’s website.