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aw and Human Rights Minister Amir Syamsuddin said that releasing drug addicts from prison and placing them in rehabilitation programs could reduce overcrowding in prisons.

He said this option was more rational than just building more prisons.

'€œI tend to oppose the idea of building new prisons,'€ Amir said during a ceremony granting remissions to child inmates held on Tuesday.

Regarding the idea of releasing drug addicts, he suggested they should be placed in rehabilitation centers instead of prisons.

He said prisons should be for drug dealers or producers rather than addicts, especially young ones.

He said 56,000 of the 117,000 inmates throughout the nation were in prison for drug-related crimes and many of them were just drug addicts. Therefore, he added, if the government were to draft a new regulation that differentiated drug users from dealers, it would reduce the number of inmates significantly. His statement was in response to criticism that almost every prison in Indonesia was overcrowded. In many cases, this problem has led into riots, crippling the management of the prison for days.