Nasheed was requested to allocate 60 million for prison expansion – Gasim

Jumhooree Party Leader, Gasim Ibrahim has said that he requested former President Mohamed Nasheed to allocate 60 million for prison expansion works during his regime when Gasim was in the Home Ministry.

Gasim said that he made this request after seeing the appalling condition of the prisons. He said that he made this request several times and also told Nasheed that he would spend himself on land reclamation necessary for the project.

"I wanted to establish a state of the art prison. I wanted to establish a rehabilitation centre next to the prison," he said.

Gasim said that a person might make a mistake but he does not believe that everyone who makes a mistake should be imprisoned for life. He said that more efforts should be made to rehabilitate prisoners instead of just keeping them in the prison doing nothing.

"I am not defending criminals or speaking about abolishing hadd punishments. I fully support 'hadd' punishments," he said.

In addition to this Gasim said that Nasheed should be ashamed of himself now to speak about parole system when Nasheed rejected all the requests made by Gasim to make more efforts to rehabilitate prisoners.