Scandinavia looks to export inmates amid tough-on-crime policies, prison overcrowding

Filed 2h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

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Robobozo

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Ktkvtsh · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Sweden has begun flying prisoners to Tartu, Estonia, under a roughly $700 million deal renting space for up to 600 inmates, with plans to relocate 200 by the end of 2026. The prisoners are Swedish citizens over 18 classified as 'category two' offenders, excluding convicted terrorists or gang members, and they retain access to Swedish television and snus despite Estonia's general no-tobacco policy.

The move follows a rightward political shift under Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson's government, driven by public alarm over gang violence even as Sweden's own crime prevention council reports overall crime trending down again in recent years, with gun deaths still a tenth of U.S. rates. The Swedish Prison and Probation Service projects the prison population could balloon from about 5,000 in 2014 to 35,000 by 2034.

Denmark is pursuing a similar path, planning to send 300 inmates to Kosovo starting next year amid a record 4,600 inmates this year against a shrinking guard workforce. Danish Prison Officers Union chair Bo Yde Sørensen called the Kosovo plan 'part of a domestic policy show' rather than a real fix, and said overcrowding has forced doubling up in cells built for one.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

When the man who actually walks the cellblocks says shipping prisoners overseas is theater and not policy, that's worth more than a minister's speech about toughness. Crime numbers are going down in both countries even as sentences go up, which is the kind of mismatch that ought to embarrass somebody, but rarely does. Renting prison space abroad is a tidy way to look busy without answering the harder question of why the cells filled up in the first place.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Robobozo · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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