Taxpayers are shelling out millions each year to house an increasing number of foreign criminals in U.S. federal prisons because their home countries won’t take them back.
Federal prisons are housing more than 40,000 non-U.S. citizens from 79 countries that participate in the International Prison Transfer Program, in which eligible and willing inmates can serve out the rest of their time behind bars in their homeland.
Used correctly, the treaty should ease prison overcrowding and save taxpayers millions of dollars, the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General said in a report made public Thursday.
Treaty nations refused to take 959 transfer-approved foreign inmates from 2011 to 2013, costing U.S. taxpayers $26 million.
Federal inmates from the 97 treaty nations number roughly 43,000, and account for one in five federal prisoners, according to the IG. That number is on the rise. Federal prisons housed 10,000 fewer inmates from treaty nations a decade ago. Less than one percent of those inmates from transfer treaty nations — 0.6 percent — go home, partly because nations like Canada and Mexico in particular often refuse to take their criminals back.
“It really comes down to a question of numbers,” DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in a statement. “Transferring more foreign national prisoners to serve the remainder of their sentence in their home country would not only help reduce overcrowding in the federal prison system, but also lower costs.”
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