Is it that there is more crime, or more imprisonment? Where does the road to justice pass?

When you hear how many people are in Turkey's prisons, compared with a few other countries, the first explanation that comes to mind is probably this: so crime rates in our country must be much higher than elsewhere. Is that really the case?

As of 3 August 2026, there are 433,520 people in Turkey's prisons. That means roughly 503 inmates per 100,000 people. In Germany, by contrast, the prison population is 57,812, a rate of 69 per 100,000. In France, 89,446 people are in prison, a rate of 131 per 100,000. In other words, Turkey's incarceration rate is about 7.3 times Germany's and about 3.8 times France's. Moreover, the Turkish figure includes not only those in pretrial detention but also convicted prisoners in open and closed prisons.

These figures are truly alarming, but what I find even more alarming is that they cannot be explained by crime rates to the same degree.

In Germany in 2025, the police recorded roughly 5.5 million offenses and identified about 2 million 50 thousand suspects. Although there was some decline in violent crime compared with the previous year, Germany is of course not a society in which crime is extremely rare.

Some will immediately react by rote, saying that coups, terrorism cases and political detainees are pushing these numbers up. Let us give the figures on this right away.

As of July 2026, the total number of people held in prison in connection with FETÖ/PDY (the Gülenist organization) is 10,485. Of these, 9,630 are convicts, 375 are "hükümsözlü" (those against whom a conviction has been handed down but is not yet final), and 480 are in pretrial detention. This figure is reported as the Ministry of Justice's July 2026 data.

As for the PKK, I have not been able to find, for now, an official organization-based figure for 2026 that is equally clear and up to date. But the closest solid official comparative data I could obtain to make do for writing this article is the Ministry of Justice data announced in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM) on 10 May 2024. According to it, there were 4,382 convicts and 1,444 pretrial detainees in prison in connection with the PKK, a total of 5,776 people. The Ministry of Justice's current equivalents are probably close to this. In other words, even the sum of the two figures does not make up a large share of the total prison population.

When we look at intentional homicide, one of the most reliable crime indicators for international comparison, we see that Turkey fares worse than Germany. Turkey's rate hovers around 3 per 100,000, whereas Germany's is below 1 and France's is around 1 to 1.5. So there is a real difference here.

However, the fact that Turkey's homicide rate is roughly three times Germany's does not, of course, imply that its incarceration rate should be more than seven times higher.

Moreover, there are examples in areas such as theft and certain property crimes where the crime rates reflected in police records are higher in Germany and France than in Turkey. Of course, we need to read these figures with caution, because the rate at which crime is reported to the police is not the same in one country as in another. Definitions of crime, recording methods and people's relationships with the police all differ. In criminology this is called the problem of the "dark figure": crimes that are committed but never enter the official records.

Therefore, although we cannot say with certainty that fewer crimes are committed in Turkey than in Germany, we can comfortably say this much: there is no data showing that the difference in criminality between Turkey and Germany or France can explain the enormous difference in the number of people in prison.

This is what should really make us think. What are those 433 thousand people telling us? The number of people in a society's prisons does not merely show the amount of crime in that society. It also shows how that society responds to crime. For what determines the prison population is, roughly, two variables:

How many people do we send to prison, and how long do we keep them there?

Suppose, for instance, that the same number of crimes can be committed in two societies. In one, a significant share of offenses is met through fines, community service, electronic monitoring, probation, treatment, restorative justice or suspended sentences. In the other, prison sentences are handed down more often for the same or similar acts, and the sentences given are served for longer. After a few years, the prisons of the second society will be several times as full as those of the first. In that case, before looking at the crime rate, one has to look at the punishment regime: which act is deemed a crime, how much punishment is prescribed for which crime, under what conditions the judge resorts to imprisonment, to what extent other sanctions can be used in place of short prison sentences, to what extent pretrial detention is really applied as a last resort, how much of the sentence the convict actually spends in prison, and how far our penal policy differs from that of other countries in areas such as drugs, organizations, terrorism, financial crimes, insult, threats and the like.

The figure of 433 thousand should compel us to ask all these questions anew.

Because in fact the matter does not remain a simple number. That is, in the end it is not only 433 thousand people who are being punished. This is where perhaps the least discussed side of the matter begins. A person sent to prison does not go to prison alone. Behind him he leaves a mother, a father, a spouse, children, siblings, sometimes a family he supports, an unfinished job and a shattered social circle.

When a father enters prison, it is not only that father who is deprived of his freedom. The household's income may decline. His wife comes under a different economic burden. A child at school has to explain why his father or mother is not with him. Prison visits, lawyers' fees, intercity journeys, visiting days and waiting by the telephone become part of the family's life.

Sociological research shows that the imprisonment of a parent can produce many secondary effects in children, such as traumatic separation, stigma, loss of income, disruption of care arrangements and displacement. A comprehensive meta-analysis also found that the risk of later antisocial behavior is significantly higher in children whose parents have been imprisoned than in other children.

Another systematic review published in 2026, covering 101,417 people from eight countries, shows that the psychological effects of a family member's imprisonment can spread not only to the prisoner but to the family system as a whole. Thus, when we talk about a prison system holding 433 thousand people, we are in fact talking about a mechanism of punishment that touches the lives of millions of people.

The person who commits the crime is one person; but we are faced with a picture in which the sociological cost of imprisonment is an entire society. Yet is the purpose of a prison sentence revenge, protecting society, deterrence, reforming the offender, redressing the harm, or making the offender once again a part of society? We need to arrive at a penal system that approaches all these questions by calculating priorities well. Justice is a virtue that looks at all of these and seeks to achieve each goal in a balance. Justice... that is the crux of the matter, and we are not at the end of the discussion, so we will continue from here.