Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 4
By Temkin Jafarov - Trend:
About 500,000 people are arrested in Iran every year on various crime charges, IRNA quoted Ali Asghar Jahangir, head of Iran's state prisons organization, as saying Nov. 4.
Some 70 percent of those arrested have no permanent jobs and are in dire financial straits, he further said.
Jahangir noted that the majority of convicts are illiterate and have no education.
"Every year, 15 million criminal cases are launched in the country, so there is not enough staff to handle most of those cases," he added.
He also said that prison inmates are being trained on specialties in line with an instruction from Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
"Currently, trainings are being held in the country's prisons on 130 specialties," Jahangir said, noting that however, only 10 to 15 percent of the trained inmates receive wages for their work on the specialties they have learnt.