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I'm not a lawyer and I don't have a job involved in this issue. I'm just a teacher who has an average knowledge about our law system. These are the things that I know about this topic:
Pity and forgiveness are characteristics of our culture. The department of justice must be filled with people who represent our characteristics very well since they have lots of pity and foregiveness to the criminals.
According our "infaz kanunu" (execution law) when a person gets a prison sentence in Turkia the actual stay is 30% of the sentence. This applies to every person and to every crime. For example if somebody is sentenced 20 years in prison for a murder he will stay only 6 years. This has been the case for ages.
The reason for this 30% rule is that our prisons were getting full and the government thought this was a nice solution. We didn't have enough prisons and sentences were not tough enough so the prisons were getting full easily.
Of course, as you can imagine this reduction only encourages crime and makes the prisons even more occupied. After all, if a criminal is released so fast what will happen most likely is that he will return to prison for another crime.
"No problem" the government thought. They had found another solution. The solution was to let all prisoners go home. We call this "af kanunu" (foregiveness law). It is a nation wide discharge of all criminals. This happens every few years and they simply release all prisoners.
If I remember correctly the last general discharge was in 2002 and they released all prisoners including rapists and murderers.
In other words, the murderers who were sentenced to 20 years and were supposed to stay 6 years did not actually stay so long because of nation wide discharge. The rapists who were sentenced 4 years (the sentence for rape is between 2 to 7 years according our law) were supposed to stay 14 months.
There was a man who shut dead 7 university students. It was a long time ago and it was a political crime. I don't know how long his original sentence was but he was supposed to stay 70 years actual in prison. This never happened. The reason for this is that every few years we had those discharge laws. With every new discharge law his sentence got lower and lower. At the end it was 19.5 years that he should stay for killing 7 people. The man was released by miscalculation after 17 years.
It is worth pointing that our law system is not focused on economical sentences to economical crimes. This means people who have condemned for economical crimes worth million dollars get only a prison sentence most of the time. You know already by know what a prison sentence means. It is a joke.
A few years ago some bank owners decided to give away huge credits to their own firms which would never pay back the credits. At the end their banks got bunkrupt, their firms got rich and the money of the bank costumers vanished. The government was responsible to pay all the money back to account holders. At the end the crime was huge. It was something around 10 billion dollars I think. The bank ovners got away with this. Some of them stayed a year in prison.
From the above you have an idea how the system works or doesnt work but what is it being in the prison? It is basically a huge room full with beds for around 20 or 25 people. We call these prison cells "koğuş". The newcomers to the koğuş are supposed to serve tea to the boss. The bigger the crime the better credibility you have in there. If you are a murderer you will have more power in there. If you are a murderer and a leader of a gang of part of any organized crime there is a good chance you might be the boss of the cell.
The boss has the power. If any other prisoner doesn't respect this power he will just get killed in prison this time by professional murderers. This doesn't mean there are many murder cases in prisons. No there probably aren't because prisoners simply obey the power of the boss.
There is a huge problem with this system. When you put 25 people in the same room where they live, eat and cook together (all cells have a mini kitchen) than every sort of things can happen. 25 men in one room, would you like to be in this situation?
If I was a prisoner I would prefer being in a cell on my own. On the other hand this almost never happens because we don't have many modern prisons. The old fashioned ones were easier to build.
Because the prisons are supposed make the prisoner a better person when he leaves the Turkish stytem of imprisonment is totally wrong.
Usually what happens is that a person gets into prison for a minor crime and while in prisons he learns major crimes.
To put terorists into the same cell is obviously the worst thing that you can do but they did. At the end the terorists were teaching others how to make a bomb. The officials can never step inside the cells in old fashined prisons. The prisoners in cells have knives they have a gas tube which they turn into a weapon (the same as the fire machines America has used in Vietnam). Once they had to send the army to a prison who had to break down walls because the authority had lost control over the cells completely. They found dummy rifles made out of woods. The terorists were giving military training inside the cells with these toy rifles and they were teaching how to use other guns and how to make a bomb.
Basically the prisons are scary because anything can happen there to you and nobody will do anything about it.
You might be an ordinary citizen. One day you write a cheque and you don't check your bank balance and at the end you could end up in prison with 24 other criminaly including murderers, rapists, thieves etc. and then you make tea to those people.
Recently the government decided to build new prisons where the cells are much smaller. These have cells for one or two people. Interestingly there was huge opposition because the teror criminals think the authorities will harm them if they are not as a group in one cell.
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