Sweden has reached an agreement with Estonia to send its prisoners overseas. The Swedish government has rented 600 places in eastern Estonia, amid a domestic crime and prison crisis.
According to Sweden’s Minister of Justice, Gunnar Strömmer, the move will save the public money. Sweden will pay 8,500 euros (£7,370) per month for each prisoner. This cost, the government has claimed, is significantly lower than the average price of keeping a prisoner in Sweden, at 11,500 euros (£9,972).
The prison space crisis comes as organised criminal gangs wreak havoc in Sweden. Such is the scale of the crime problem, in 2023, Swedish courts handed down prison sentences totalling 200,000 months—almost 25% more than the previous year and double that of 10 years ago.
In 2023, Göran Adamson, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Uppsala University, told Express.co.uk that his country was becoming a “capital of violence”.
According to official figures from the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå), the number of fatalities a year per million from gun violence is more than double the European average.
In 2017, there were 281 shootings in Sweden, and by 2022, that number had grown to 391, 62 of which were fatal. According to the Office for National Statistics, in the UK there were 28 people killed by shooting in the year ending March 2022.
That means the Swedish rate of death by shooting was more than twice that of the UK, despite Sweden having a population less than a sixth the size. Most startlingly, in 2022 the gun murder rate in Stockholm was around 30 times that of London, despite having a population of less than a million.
Sweden’s deal with Estonia comes shortly after Reform UK leader Nigel Farage revealed his party would adopt a similar approach to the UK’s prison overcrowding problem.
In a speech on law and order on Monday, Mr Farage said: “It is quite astonishing that to keep a prisoner in a British prison it costs nearly £52,000 a year.
“You could send a child Eton for that price.
“So we can send some of our worst violent criminals overseas to serve their terms.”
