Prison Overcrowding
First Petition
On October 23, 2023, ACRI, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel petitioned the Supreme Court to revoke the temporary order intended to allow prison wardens to have security and criminal prisoners and detainees sleep on the floor and to hold them in conditions of unlimited overcrowding. The temporary order stipulates that these measures will first be taken against security prisoners, and would be applied to criminal prisoners only when directly necessitated by the security situation.
The petition argued that the temporary order allows prison wardens to humiliate, endanger, and violate the privacy of prisoners by holding them in inhumane conditions of overcrowding. This constitutes cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment, which is prohibited, including during emergencies. The temporary order also discriminates against security prisoners and results in unequal treatment.
The temporary order was enacted against the backdrop of the war. Since the outbreak of the war, hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested, most of whom were from the West Bank and in Israel without permits. Meanwhile, The Israel Prison Service (IPS) has had an ongoing shortage of prison space since before the war, when the number of people held by the IPS exceeded its prison capacity by nearly 2,000. Instead of taking extreme measures resulting in the denial of fundamental rights and stripping prisoners of their humanity, the State should have acted to reduce overcrowding in prisons and adopted measures that had been taken in the past and proven effective. The petition cited a series of rulings that held that violating a prisoner's human dignity affects not only the prisoner but also the character of a society, and that humane treatment of prisoners is part of the moral and human standard that a democratic state is obligated to uphold.
On October 30, 2023, the Court dismissed the petition, on the grounds that the temporary order was limited to a short period, because of the oversight and review mechanisms it established, and because of the exceptional state of emergency that prevailed in the country when the petition was filed. Nevertheless, the Court saw fit to emphasize the State's obligation to protect the rights of prisoners, particularly the right to minimum living space and the right to sleep on a bed, and to take action to stabilize the prison crisis.
On January 17, 2024, one day before the temporary order was due to expire, the Knesset passed a bill extending it by four and a half months. Since then, the temporary order was since extended a number of times, while the number of prisoners continued to rise and conditions in prisons continued to deteriorate. ACRI opposed the extensions.
Second Petition
On September 24, 2026, ACRI petitioned the Supreme Court against the Knesset, the government, the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, the Minister of National Security, the Attorney General, and the Commissioner of the Israel Prison Service, demanding the revocation of the temporary orders allowing prisoners to be held in overcrowded conditions and made to sleep without a bed.
The petition argued that the temporary order was intended to serve as temporary, limited authorization to deviate from the provisions of the law and court rulings, while also advancing meaningful and effective solutions that would reduce prison overcrowding and bring an end to the prison crisis, which, as noted, was an issue even before the war. Instead, after nearly three years, the temporary order has become continual. It has intensified the overcrowding crisis, and violates human rights to the point of actual torture. Unlike the temporary orders that preceded it, the current temporary order eliminated the link between the denial of prisoners' rights and the security situation, which originally justified the enactment of the first temporary order. As a result, the prison crisis itself has become the justification for continuing the system.
The petition presented data on the intolerable conditions in prisons. As of August 31, 2026:
Nearly 60% of all people held in IPS facilities, 13,653 people, were being held with less than 3 square meters of living space per person, an amount of space that the Supreme Court has ruled is unfit for human habitation. This includes approximately 90% of security prisoners and approximately 39% of criminal prisoners.
Approximately 19% of all prisoners sleep on mattresses, without a bed.
Prisoners have virtually no ability to walk around their cells or for several people to stand at the same time.
The overcrowding creates cramped and suffocating conditions in the cells, adversely affects prisoners' health, and causing friction. These overcrowded and cramped conditions are compounded by the general worsening of prison conditions, including abuse, violence, starvation, and the denial of access to medical care.
The extreme overcrowding is a major violation of prisoners' fundamental rights, including the right to dignity, circumvents the provisions of the law, and effectively nullifies landmark Supreme Court rulings establishing that every person held in state custody is entitled to basic conditions, including minimum living space and a bed to sleep on. Additionally, because under the temporary order the option of holding prisoners in overcrowded conditions and having them sleep without a bed is applied first to security prisoners and applied to criminal prisoners only under more limited circumstances, the system discriminates between groups of prisoners.
As the petition argues, the State has resoundingly failed to address the prison crisis. It treats the rapid increase in the prison population as an unavoidable reality that must simply be accepted, even though it is a direct result of arrest, prosecution, and enforcement policies. It also persists in promoting solutions that offer no long-term solutions for the overcrowding, while failing to advance more effective solutions that would keep pace with the growth of the prison population and adequately address the extreme situation, such as reducing nonessential arrests.
For a full list of legal correspondence, see here (Heb).
