Europe’s JUSTICE ministries have a problem. Courts are locking up more criminals, but figuring out where to put them is proving tricky. In a growing number of countries, prisons are packed to the rafters. Occupancy levels now average close to 95% in the European Union; they exceed 100% in nearly half the bloc, mainly in Western Europe. Beyond the EU, the trend is similar. Even in Switzerland and Iceland, which boast some of the lowest crime rates in the world, jails look uncomfortably full, thanks to lengthier sentences. Britain’s are bursting. Building new prisons is expensive, slow and provokes resistance from the NIMBY crowd.
Some governments are turning to unconventional solutions. On May 18th France’s justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, announced plans for a new prison in Guiana, a French overseas territory in South America, including a high-security wing for particularly dangerous criminals. To avoid drawing parallels with the days when France ran the notorious Devil’s Island penal colony there, Mr Darmanin emphasised that most spaces will be filled by local offenders and drug traffickers.
For countries lacking overseas territories with cheap land and flexible construction rules, the challenge is tougher. One solution lies in European countries that do not face prison overcrowding. Some countries with spare capacity seem open to renting out their vacant cells. For €200m ($234m) over ten years, Kosovo has agreed to house 300 inmates from Denmark in its Gjilan prison. That will cut Danish occupancy levels from near-full to a more manageable 92%. Kosovo is also talking to other countries, including Belgium. Estonia, where nearly half of prison cells sit empty, is putting out feelers to potential renters. Sweden is said to be interested: its crackdown on gang violence is landing ever more people in the slammer.
But other issues are in play. Both United Nations guidelines (known as the Nelson Mandela rules) and the Council of Europe’s rules give prisoners the right to in-person contact with family. The distances involved in some rental arrangements make this prohibitive. Families of Danish prisoners would face a journey of over 2,100km to visit inmates at Gjilan. Danish authorities want to arrange virtual visits and provide funding for travel, but inmates will find sentences lonely.
Governments are trying to get round these concerns by reserving the schemes for foreign nationals, who represent a hefty share of the prison population in much of western Europe. This also allows governments to spin the proposals as a way of getting tough on illegal immigration. It is no coincidence that most of the countries considering prisoner transfers are ones where far-right parties are particularly influential, or (in Denmark’s case) where the government has adopted a hardline stance on immigration. The idea is that once prisoners have served their sentence overseas, they will be deported directly to their country of origin, rather than going back to the country in which they were convicted.
Others fret about conditions in foreign prisons. Countries with cells for rent have little experience with foreigners in custody. Language barriers pose obvious challenges. If the schemes materialise, governments may need to hire or retrain a lot of new prison staff. But prisoners are unlikely to be enthusiastic about being forcibly carted off to faraway facilities, while prison guards may resent treating foreign inmates better than local ones. The atmosphere in such prisons could become extremely tense.
Longer prison terms are one reason for the overcrowding. Moving prisoners to rented jails abroad is a dodge, says Catherine Heard of the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research in London: “Rather than accepting that decades of tougher sentencing policies are what caused the crisis, not foreign criminals, it is politically easier to reach for a headline-grabber, like deportation to Kosovo.