The visualizations presented herein are based exclusively on information obtained from publicly available sources through open-source investigation (OSINT) methods, concerning individuals imprisoned in Iran over the past three decades due to an inability to meet financial obligations. The scope of this work is limited to imprisonment arising from civil and financial debts — as opposed to imprisonment for criminal offenses — including mehriyeh (a marital financial entitlement owed by a husband to his wife), dishonored checks, diyah (compensation for bodily harm or death), and other civil or financial debts.
The same general OSINT approach was applied throughout the period covered by the dataset, although the availability, format, and accessibility of source material varied considerably over time. Source material includes official statements and reports issued by relevant Iranian governmental and judicial authorities, public announcements by non-governmental organizations and charitable entities involved in debt-relief and prisoner-release initiatives, domestic Iranian news outlets, judicial and administrative publications, and other publicly accessible materials. No data were obtained through private, confidential, or unauthorized access of any kind; every figure can be traced to a publicly available source.
Each entry in this dataset was traced to and confirmed against at least one specific, identifiable public source — such as a news article, official statement, or institutional website. Where a reported figure could not be linked to a specific, citable source, it was excluded from the dataset. Where multiple sources reported the same statistic, efforts were made to identify the original reporting source and avoid duplicate recording. Conflicting figures were not resolved through a single uniform rule; how each instance was handled depended on the specific circumstances of the case, and any unresolved conflicts are interpreted cautiously in light of the limitations described below.
Individuals included in this dataset were imprisoned for several distinct reasons — mehriyeh, dishonored checks, diyah, and other financial obligations — each governed by different procedural rules. An effort was made throughout this work to keep these categories clearly distinguished to the extent possible. What unites them, and what justifies their inclusion in a single dataset, is that in each case imprisonment resulted from the individual’s inability to pay a financial debt, rather than from a separate criminal offense.
This dataset does not, and cannot, claim to be a complete or final accounting of debt-related imprisonment in Iran. Operating within a restricted information environment, the figures presented reflect a minimum verifiable baseline drawn from public records, not an exhaustive total. Several structural constraints limit the dataset’s scope:
- Lack of systematic, centralized transparency: Official Iranian statistics on debt-related imprisonment are not consistently compiled or published. Reporting practices vary across provinces, courts, and time periods; official figures are at times revised without explanation; and the absence of a public, searchable database significantly limits independent verification and cross-year or cross-province comparison.
- Restricted and unstable access to sources: Access to relevant materials has been constrained on multiple fronts. Periods of internet blackout or severely throttled connectivity inside Iran in the past few years have, at various points, disrupted access to domestic sources and impeded timely documentation, archiving, and verification of data. Certain government datasets and websites are additionally inaccessible from IP addresses outside Iran, restricting independent verification from abroad. A number of websites that previously published relevant data — including certain pages maintained by Diya relief headquarters, the Prisons Organization, provincial judiciary offices, and domestic media outlets — remain closed, unstable, or inaccessible; in some cases, only a headline, archived version, re-publication, or search-result snippet remained retrievable.
- Open-sentence (ray baz) prisoners excluded: Financial debtors who received open verdict (ray baz) — permitted to work outside prison subject to reporting back on a specified date — are not reflected in this dataset. Their numbers are not made public by the government and could not be obtained through open sources.
- Discrepancies in reported statistics: Different officials have, in some instances, cited differing figures for the same province and time period, and aggregate figures announced by one authority have not always matched the sum of annual or provincial figures published elsewhere. These discrepancies reflect the absence of a unified, transparent system for recording and publishing this data rather than isolated errors.
- Absence of structured, periodic reporting: Statistics on financial debtors and individuals convicted of unintentional offenses are not published as part of regular annual reports. Data releases have typically been tied to specific occasions — charitable fundraising events, religious commemorations, press conferences, or official visits — resulting in figures that are scattered, event-driven, and irregular, and that do not necessarily reflect a complete picture of any given year or province.
- Use of release figures as a proxy indicator: In the absence of regular data on the number of financial debtors currently held in custody, statistics on released prisoners were examined as a proxy — providing a minimum estimate of the number of individuals who came into contact with the prison system on account of debt or financial conviction in a given year. This approach captures only an observable floor and cannot reflect the actual total number of individuals who entered custody over the course of a year.
- Volatility of the financial-prisoner population: The population of financial debtors in detention fluctuates considerably; an individual may remain imprisoned for only days or weeks before release through family assistance, a plaintiff’s forgiveness, installment arrangements, personal payment, or charitable support. A point-in-time figure — for example, an official’s statement that 400 financial debtors are held in a given province on a given date — may therefore understate, by a significant multiple, the total number of individuals who passed through custody over the course of that year.
- Blending and overlap among release pathways and reporting institutions: Many reports do not specify the channel through which a release was secured — whether through Diya relief headquarters, charitable or public donations, payment by the prisoner or their family, or a plaintiff’s forgiveness. In some cases, multiple institutions — including Diya headquarters, the Prisons Organization, the Basij, state-affiliated financial entities, or other organizations — have each contributed to securing a release, and the same cases may have been counted separately by each. Where release pathways and institutional contributions are not clearly distinguished, the risk of duplication in reported figures cannot be excluded.
- Lack of breakdown by debt type and absence of demographic data: Official statistics generally do not provide a reliable breakdown by debt type. Mehriyeh, nafaqeh (spousal maintenance), dishonored checks, promissory notes, guarantees, diyah, commercial debt, and other financial convictions are frequently aggregated under broad labels such as “financial prisoners” or “prisoners of unintentional offenses,” limiting the ability to analyze the legal and social dimensions of each category. Most sources similarly provide no information on age, gender, marital status, education, employment, debt amount, plaintiff type, length of detention, or prior criminal record, which significantly constrains deeper analysis of vulnerable groups and systemic patterns.
- Ambiguity in release terminology: Some reports — particularly those from the COVID-19 period — use terms such as “release,” “leave,” “reduction of the criminal population,” or “case review” without specifying whether an individual was definitively released, granted temporary leave, given an open verdict, placed on an installment plan, or simply had their case under review. This imprecision increases the risk of misreading the underlying figures.
- Selective reporting and institutional self-promotion: In the absence of an independent body responsible for aggregating and verifying this data, the possibility of overstated institutional performance, selective presentation of figures, or duplicate reporting across institutions cannot be ruled out. Data collection was particularly difficult in provinces such as Tehran, Fars, Isfahan, Alborz, Qom, Gilan, and Khorasan Razavi, either because the volume of relevant statistics was high or because their wider publication may have carried political or reputational sensitivity for the government.
For these reasons, the figures presented here almost certainly undercount the true scale of debt-related imprisonment in Iran. Without access to internal government or judiciary records, a fully accurate and complete picture is not achievable by any external party. This dataset represents the best available reflection of the issue based on open-source material under current conditions — not a definitive or final accounting.
Unless otherwise indicated, all figures and classifications reflect the information reported by the cited sources at the time of collection and may not capture subsequent corrections or updates. Any accompanying analysis or observations represent the author’s assessment of the available data and should be considered in light of the limitations described above.