MOSCOW - Almost half of prisoners in Russia's overcrowded jails suffer from various illnesses, most of them mental, Deputy Justice Minister Yury Kalinin said on Saturday.

Out of 962,000 prisoners, 460,000 are ill, the deputy minister was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

Some 305,000 inmates have mental illnesses. The prison administration does not have the facilities to keep them separately so only those deemed dangerous to others are isolated, Kalinin explained.

Turberculosis is no less of a problem, with 92,000 prisoners suffering from TB and 36,000 new cases registered annually.

To make things worse, 32,000 inmates have a strain of the disease that is resistant to all drugs.

The TB death rate in prisons and pre-trial detention centers is 12 times higher than in the country as a whole, even though the rate has been somewhat reduced thanks to new treatment techniques, Kalinin said.

The number of Russian prisoners registered with HIV, the virus that causes aids, has increased to 33,600, and there are some 30,000 syphilis cases and 8,000 people with various types of hepatitis.

"Gradually, our department is developing from corrective to medical," said Kalinin.

The conditions in Russian jails are regularly denounced by human rights organizations, including the Council of Europe, of which Russia is a member.