When Prisons Become Foreign Policy

A now-closed immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” New, foreign-funded “model” prisons rising across the Caribbean. And El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, where more than 250 people deported from the U.S.—including Kilmar Abrego Garcia—were sent earlier this year. Together, they reveal how a global vision of mass incarceration is spreading, one cellblock at a time.

These facilities illustrate a growing obsession with prison construction as the only perceived solution to crime. Much of this expansion is at least partly financed—even after the Trump administration’s major cuts to the U.S. foreign aid budget—by the U.S. and the European Union. Each of these facilities divert resources away from more effective and humane approaches to creating saf