Malaysian prisons overused, says I-Cells

The low usage of alternatives to imprisonment and pre-release schemes has resulted in overused of prisons in Malaysia, a human rights conference here was told.

International Centre For Law & Legal Studies (I-Cells) Executive Council Member Professor Dirk Van Zyl Smit said I-Cells finding indicated that of 37,625 inmates in 2011, 12,338 prisoners were serving sentences below 5 year.

"In the same period, 6,927 prisoners were foreigners for immigration offences or violent crimes," he said when presenting his paper entitled "The Malaysian criminal justice audit: preliminary findings" at the Legal Transformation Conference on Security and Rights, here on Tuesday.

He said as of July 2012, out of 36,728 prisoners, a total of 9,757 were foreigners with the highest percentage in Tawau, Sabah, recording 64 percent of foreign prisoners (888 foreigners from 1,377 inmates), Sandakan 66 percent (420 foreigners from 636 inmates) and Kota Kinabalu 40 percent (621 foreigners from 4,547 inmates).

Zyl Smit said the findings also revealed that up to 90 percent of defendants in subordinate courts were unrepesented by counsel where there were high numbers of guilty pleas reported in 2011.

He said in sessions courts there were about 42.2 percent guilty pleas out of 313,609 criminal cases while 52.3 percent guilty pleas out of 26,416 criminal cases were recorded in Magistrates courts.

He said the criminal justice audit was a snapshot of the whole criminal justice system in Malaysia that functioned as data-based, to identify issues and key challenges, assist policy makers to better identify areas for improvement and its was an interactive report.

"The criminal justice audit however is not a one-off assessment and a tool to rate or score a country's justice system," he added.