Heba Press/. Rabat
Muhammad Saleh Al Tamek, general delegate in charge of prison administration and reintegration, warned
Faced with the increase in the number of prisoners in the country, having reached 105,000 prisoners, he called for providing “appropriate conditions” to activate alternative sentences.
Tamek said: “The number of prisoners in Morocco reached 105,000 prisoners last October, compared to 103,000 prisoners during the same month last year, an increase of 2,000 prisoners during this period, this which reflects the upward trend in the number of prisoners in the future. .”
According to the Moroccan official, statistical data confirms “the increase in the number of detainees in recent years”.
Al-Tamak explained that this number “has increased by half over the past ten years, showing an upward trend that threatens to reach an unprecedented number of prisoners, far exceeding the capacity of penitentiary facilities.”
He continued: “These figures come despite the prison administration’s efforts to increase its reception capacity, and its repeated calls to take effective and tangible parallel measures to limit the repercussions of this dilemma and its negative repercussions on all security and correctional programs, and its exhaustion of employees’ energies.
According to the Moroccan official, “the 2025 finance law follows exceptional legislative dynamism which concerned justice, prison management and reintegration, and which resulted in the ratification of the law relating to alternative sentences”.
He stressed that the Alternative Penal Code “constitutes an important step in the process of reforming the country’s penal system, because it provides alternatives to prison sentences in order to reduce pressure on prisons and facilitate the social integration of convicts , as we hope. considered as one of the solutions that could help reduce the number of people arriving in institutions.
According to Tamek, “Regardless of the development of criminal phenomena and their connection with the effectiveness of public policies used to prevent them, the achievement of these objectives remains fundamentally linked to the provision of appropriate conditions for the implementation of the requirements of this law and the level of effectiveness of the law. this type of punishment by reforming the convicts.”
The alternative Penal Code came into force last August, after its publication in the Official Journal, which “constitutes an alternative to custodial sentences in cases where the sentence imposed does not exceed 5 years of effective imprisonment”.
Alternative sanctions include “working for the public good, electronic surveillance, restriction of certain rights or imposition of monitoring, remedial or rehabilitation measures and daily fines.”
