Iran has for the first time sentenced an underage criminal to house arrest rather than jail, as the prisons system tries to cope with rapidly swelling numbers, press reports said Sunday.
A 15-year-old girl, who ran away from home to protest her divorced father's plans to remarry and was arrested for vagrancy, was sentenced to three months of detention at her home, the government newspaper Iran said.
The paper said it was the first sentence of its kind in the Islamic republic, which is now jailing one person every 59 seconds, according to official prison statistics released earlier this month.
Iran's top judge Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi-Shahrudi said recently that the nation's overcrowded prison should be considered a last resort for many offenders -TEHRAN(AFP)
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