Our reporting activities, which are carried out with a focus on monitoring and advocacy, aim to produce verifiable information periodically, increase the knowledge about prisons through annual reports and different thematic reports, and disseminate such information. This report attempts to draw a panorama of what happened in Turkish prisons in 2022. The general situation of prisons and rights violations are discussed in the first part of the report; the second part focuses on the problems of prisoners with special needs and recommends policies to solve these problems.

This report tries to draw a panorama of what happened in Turkish prisons throughout 2021. In the first part of the report, the general situation of prisons and the course of changing practices with COVID-19 measures are mentioned, while the second part focuses on the problems of prisoners with special needs, which have changed with the pandemic, and policy recommendations are presented to solve these problems.

The Civil Society in the Penal System Association (CİSST) monitors the requests, complaints and claims of rights violations received from prisoners and their kin by means of the applications made to the human rights monitoring and supervision mechanisms. In such applications, CİSST demands from the supervision mechanisms to investigate and inspect the claims of rights violations conveyed, and invites the institutions with the authority for on-site monitoring to carry out monitoring activities at prisons and to report the outcomes of such monitoring.
This report aims to present an assessment of the applications made by CİSST throughout 2022 to the boards with the authority to inspect and supervise the human rights conditions at the prisons, and of the responses to these applications.

This report has been written so as to express the conditions of prisons and prisoners with special needs in Turkey. The report which comprises information about developments took place in 2019 is the first of the reports CISST intend to publish annually.

The report consists of two parts given the scope of problems and violations in the prisons. In the first part a general view about prisons, the areas right violations concentrated, and the turning points in the history of the prisons and the regime of execution are recounted. First of all the challenges in accessing data about prisons, the data acquisition methodology of CISST, and CISST database which provides the data used in this report will be discussed. Subsequently, a historical background considering the relationship between the current situation and problems of the prisons, and the transitions of the prisons and of the regime of execution will be described.
Finally, the current situation and problems will be discussed in regard to the intensfying right violations. The second part of the report is dedicated to the findings of the research and work done in thematic fields, put into practice by CISST with the project of “Prisoners with Special Needs” in 2012, which investigates the problems of LGBTI+, child, woman, worker, disabled, student, foreigner and aggravated life prisoners distinctively. In that part, specific complaints and needs of the prisoners with special needs, and the right violations frequently experienced by them are scrutinized.