Sri Lanka’s prison population has risen to 40,000 — close to four times the system’s official capacity of 11,000 — Commissioner of Prisons Operations and Prisons Spokesperson Anuruddha Gajanayake disclosed on Friday.
Of the current inmate population, roughly 10,000 are convicted prisoners serving sentences, Gajanayake said. The remaining 30,000 are remand suspects awaiting trial, a structural overcrowding figure that points to extended pre-trial detention as the dominant driver of the system’s load rather than convictions.
The disclosure puts a current number on a chronically over-capacity prison system whose scale Gajanayake has been the most consistent public voice on through this year’s accountability cycle. The Commissioner was the official who confirmed the release of 33 inmates under a presidential Vesak pardon at the end of May, and he is the recurring source on transfers and operational decisions out of Welikada and the high-security units.
The 40,000-vs-11,000 ratio underlines the operational pressure on a system that has produced multiple custody-related developments in recent weeks — including the hospitalisation of former SIS chief Suresh Sallay from CID custody and active congestion at the prison facilities running parallel inquests and accountability cases. With three-quarters of inmates on remand, any meaningful reduction in numbers depends on the throughput of the Magistrate’s and High Court systems rather than on early-release mechanisms inside the Prisons Department.
Source: NewsFirst.
