Sentenced to death in Turkish jails

The Justice Ministry recently announced that there are 387 inmates in Turkey's prisons with serious illnesses. Of these inmates, 114 are suffering from cancer.

Did you know that more than 300 prisoners die every year in Turkey? Indeed, almost every day a coffin comes out of our prisons. They say it is fate, but it is not exactly like that...

In terms of hospitals in Turkish prisons, there are only 50-bed capacity hospitals in five campus-style prisons. Prisons with a capacity of 1,000 inmates or more have a kind of "family doctor" system. In this system, twice a week a doctor comes to the hospital to examine prisoners for a total of 12 hours. These hospitals have no doctors ready for emergency interventions. 

It is not even so easy to benefit from the visit of the doctor who comes twice a week. An inmate first needs to write an application. These applications then get listed. If there are too many requests an inmate sometimes has to wait two or three weeks to see a doctor, regardless of whether it is an emergency.

As for the doctors, they have a heavy responsibility, having only a few minutes to talk with inmate patients and diagnose them.

Berivan Korkut, who works at an NGO focusing on prisons, says many complaints come from inmates who are simply given painkillers or anti-depressants by doctors without a proper medical examination.

There are cases where inmates leave prison with serious illnesses or die a few weeks after they are released because there has been no serious medical examination.

Being sent to prison hospital is a separate problem. "Let's say you have both a heart problem and a kidney problem," says Korkut, "you can be told by the prison authorities that you cannot go to the hospital twice...