Jakarta – Indonesia's justice minister has bemoaned the level of overcrowding in the country's penitentiaries, saying more needs to be done to rehabilitate rather than incarcerate drug users, who make up a large portion of the prison population.
"Prisons are supposed to serve a role as a place for redemption," Minister Yasonna Laoly said at a conference in Bogor on Monday night. "What we would like is for [convicted drug users] to have their sentences commuted, while drug dealers and traffickers get heavier sentences."
He noted that the country's 477 prisons, all managed by the Justice Ministry, were severely overcrowded, built to hold 119,500 people but now home to more than 173,000 – leaving them nearly 45 percent over capacity.
Yasonna said casual drug users and addicts accounted for some 18,400 inmates, but that ideally they should be in rehabilitation centers rather than in prison.
"The most humane solution would be to, at one end, work with the police and the BNN" – National Narcotics Agency – "to crack down on drug trafficking, and, at the other end, to help rehabilitate the users currently in prison," he said.
Indonesia's notoriously harsh drug laws were amended a few years ago to allow addicts or those caught with small amounts of narcotics for personal consumption to opt for mandatory rehabilitation to avoid criminal charges.
However, that provision remains little-known among the general population, while police, prosecutors and judges tend to favor prosecuting all drug offenders, regardless of the amount of narcotics they are caught with or whether they express a willingness to undergo rehabilitation.
I Wayan Kusmintha, the Justice Ministry's director general of corrections, who oversees the prison system, identified three factors for the high number of casual drug users behind bars.
First, he said, was the high rate of prosecutions, despite the more lenient provisions in the durg law. "Our justice system tends to be rigid, such that even the most trivial of cases end up in court," he said.
Second, he went on, was the shortage of juvenile detention centers. Of the nearly 500 penitentiaries nationwide, only 13 are designated for minors, meaning that juvenile offenders in regions without one of these special prisons wind up in regular jails among more hardened adult inmates, where they are at risk of picking up a more serious drug habit, among other things, Kusmintha said.
The third factor he identified as the shortage of rehabilitation centers for drug users.
The Justice Ministry's more conciliatory approach to handling drug offenders comes in stark contrast to that of the new BNN chief, Budi Waseso, who has called for an end to government funding for rehabilitation centers, and repeatedly branded drug users – whether they reform or not – as "less than human."