| This call to action on prison overcrowding is purely an act of conscience and non-partisan.
The prisons are overcrowded very much due to the way we handle drug offences. Up to two-thirds of inmates are linked to drugs one way or the other. Most of the prison officers I met agreed that we need to rethink the issue of drug offences. They knew for a fact that prisons often function as a “university” for people who had committed petty crimes, especially drug offences, to pick up new and more sophisticated criminal skills, and to be recruited into larger crime networks.
Nurul Izzah Anwar has also since 2018 campaigned for improvements to our prison system, targeting 75 percent of eligible, non-violent criminals to be absorbed into corrective community programmes. In 2018, she even tabled a private member’s bill on prison reform. The fact is that we have too many people sentenced to prison than we have prison spaces. But the core challenge is something else, and the solution is not more prisons. That would cost more continuous expenditure, and would still be an avoidance of the problem.
The scheme was finally abolished by the National Security Council, of which Muhyiddin attended as home minister, in 2019. I was told that there were attempts to move the prison inmates to new privately-run prisons. But again, this is really not the solution. On the decriminalisation of drugs, he added that a special committee had been set up including representatives from the Health Ministry, Youth and Sports Ministry, AADK to discuss various aspects of legislation on drugs.
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