Prisons without borders

13 June 2025

Did you know it was possible to serve a prison sentence abroad? Well, Estonia has reached a deal with Sweden to rent its prison space and accept up to 600 Swedish inmates starting from July 2026. Discussions about outsourcing Estonian prisons have been ongoing since last summer, and multiple countries – like Sweden and the Netherlands – have expressed interest.

Swedish prisons are currently operating at 96% capacity, partly because of rising gang crime. This has resulted in Sweden having the highest rate of deadly gun violence per capita in Europe. Sweden has been looking for a solution for a while now and has been investigating the feasibility of hosting its inmates elsewhere since 2023.

Enter Estonia, which had the EU's lowest prison occupancy rate in 2023 at 56.2%. Its conviction rates have fallen, with the number of inmates reaching an all-time low in 2023 and continuing to drop.

It's cheaper too: Sweden has agreed to pay €8,500 per inmate per month, which is less than the €11,500 it would cost at home. Meanwhile, the cost of housing a prisoner in Estonia is around €5,000. The deal will also create 400 jobs at Tartu Prison, which recently made staff cuts due to low occupancy.

It sounds like a win-win situation for everybody, doesn't it? However, Estonians are mainly concerned about the inmates who will be sent there, fearing that organised crime will be imported along with them.

To address this, Estonia will assess inmates individually and will only accept healthy adult men serving long sentences – for crimes like murder, sexual assault or embezzlement. Anyone tied to gangs or extremism will be excluded.

This isn't a first: Norway housed inmates in the Netherlands between 2015 and 2018, and Denmark is set to transfer prisoners to Kosovo in 2026. But these deals have sparked controversy due to differences in sentencing conditions, as Nordic countries are known for their focus on rehabilitation.

For the Swedish-Estonian deal, agreements have been made to ensure that these inmates would have a similar experience to a term in a Swedish prison. While Tartu prison has very modern infrastructure, similar to Swedish prisons, there are differences in how the sentences unfold. For example, Sweden and Estonia do not have the same disciplinary measures, so it has been agreed that Estonian disciplinary penalties will not be applied to Swedish inmates.

However, after Norway stopped outsourcing the cells for its inmates, a Norwegian prison law group stated that they believed inmates carrying out their sentence in the Netherlands received fewer and less meaningful rehabilitation opportunities than inmates in Norwegian prisons. Denmark's deal with Kosovo raised human rights concerns, as there have been allegations of abuse in Kosovo's prisons in the past.

While outsourcing incarceration may ease overcrowding, it raises questions about the rights of prisoners held outside their country's justice system. For instance, however modern the Tartu Prison may be, Estonia places less focus on rehabilitation than the Nordic model. Even with adaptations made to ensure the sentences carried out at home or abroad are similar, can they ever really be the same?