Well over half a million Iranians have been imprisoned by their regime since the start of the year, Director-General of the Cultural and Disciplinary Committee of the Iranian Prisons Organization Mansour Moqareh-Abed told Iranian newspaper Jomhouri Islami.

The interview was cited by the website of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an umbrella organization for Iranian opposition groups in exile...

Mansour Moqareh-Abed, the Director General of the Cultural and Disciplinary Committee of the Iranian Prisons Organization, said that since the start of the year between 600,000 to 700,000 people had been sent to prison in Iran, the semi-official daily Jomhouri-Islami reported on December 20. He added it is not possible to accommodate “the cultural and disciplinary” needs of this many prisoners. Everyday 2,600 people are sent to prison; thus, in a year the figure grows to one million. This means that out of every 75 people in Iran one is sent to prison every year - an unprecedented world record. In Norway the number of people sent to prison annually is the equivalent of one out of every 1,540 people, in France it is one out of 1,100, in Japan it is one out of 1,700 and in Pakistan it is one out of 1,800 people.

Obviously, the actual number of detainees in Iran is much higher than the official figure since it does not take into account various unofficial penitentiaries and prisons. In particular, the regime has stepped up suppression to an unprecedented level and street arrests have increased in order to combat the rising number of popular demonstrations and uprisings.

Separately, the Chief of the State Security Forces, Brig. Gen. Ismail Ahmadi-Moqaddam, in an interview with the state-run news agency ISNA on December 20, asked for more judicial prosecutions to be put into place, saying, “Unfortunately, at present there are neither strong legal convictions nor adequate sentences for crimes committed.”...