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By C1 Staff
WASHINGTON — As overcrowding in federal, state, and local prisons and jails reaches epidemic proportions, a new program run by a private enterprise may be the best solution suggested yet: ship inmates to overseas facilities.
A new California-based startup named Inmates Without Borders aims to take every person incarcerated for sentence of more than 10 years and ship them for the duration of their stay to “partner facilities” in other countries.
Under the new program, Inmates Without Borders will temporarily take custody of a facility’s overcrowded population for a fee of 35 percent of the cost of housing that inmate. IWB will then “match” the inmate with an appropriate “partner facility” in one of five countries — Pakistan, Thailand, Rwanda, North Korea, and Venezuela — with which formal agreements have already been signed.
New countries can be added following a vetting process to determine that the sheer brutality of the facility is certified at an adequate level. Upon completion of the foreign transfer IWB keeps 25 percent of the American prison’s fee, and transfers the remaining ten percent to the foreign facility.
Inmates Without Borders founder and CEO Martin Freeman said, “We’ve been transferring all the Gitmo detainees to places like Yemen for seven years now and we’ve hardly made even a dent in our overcrowding problems. We believe that if we are able to secure private agreements with our correctional counterparts in places like Pakistan, Thailand, Rwanda, North Korea, and Venezuela we can begin transferring our way out of this overcrowding situation in most of our facilities here in the United States.”
Critics say that Inmates Without Borders will fail because in many cases so far with the Guantanamo Bay transfers of known terrorists, the incarcerated individuals ultimately end up walking free due to escape or outright release, and that pattern would continue with general population prisoners.
“Look, we all know that the Gitmo transfers have been an unmitigated disaster,” said one prison official who spoke with Corrections1 on the condition of anonymity. “We can’t have that same kind of failure repeated with our domestic murderers, rapists, and violent criminals.”
But Freeman counters by saying, “Even if you do have some prisoners go free, what you will end up having is an early release program that happens to deposit the released inmates in a far-off land. See what am I saying? Those individuals will have one hell of a time even surviving the streets in places like Lahore, Kigali, or Bangladesh, much less find a way to return back to the United States. What we’re really talking about here is a one-way ticket out of our overcrowding problem.”