The best way to halt the spread of Covid-19 in prisons is to quickly vaccinate inmates in facilities where the number of infections is zero, Justice Minister Somsak Thepsutin said on Monday.
Mr Somsak said vacination would reduce the number of inmates being infected.
The Justice Ministry had request Health Minister Anutin Chanvirakul to allocate vaccines for inmates in prisons where there were no Covid infections, to prevent them catching the disease.
He said Mr Anutin would explain the details to the public.
Mr Somsak said if people knew about the problems associated with overcrowding in prisons, they would not be raising questions about the daily reports of coronavirus disease among inmates.
When he first took the position of justice minister there were about 390,000 inmates in prisons throughout the country. He had managed to reduce the number to an extent, but the prisons were still overcrowded and the problem was hard to solve.
According to international standard, inmates should each have a space of 2.25 square metres to sleep in, but in fact they had only 1.2 square metres each.
And since inmates should also be kept 1.5-2 metres apart under the standard covid social distancing rule, it was very difficult to prevent infection spreading in the present conditions, he said.
Mr Somsak said to solve the problem of overcrowding, about 100 new prisons would have to be built. Since a prison cost about 1.5 billion baht, at least 150 billion baht would be needed to build 100 prisons, he said.
Asked how he could be certain that inmates to be released under a royal pardon marking his His Majesty the King's birthday on July 28 would not be infected with Covid-19, Mr Somsak said there were still 58 days to acquire vaccines to be administered to inmates who were not yet infected, and for bed-ridden inmates, before they were released.
