“Switzerland has too many criminals and too few prisons”

The title of this post is from the first sentence of this recent AP article headlined “Switzerland mulls plan to export prisoners.” Here is more about a notable European nation having a problem all to common in the US:

Now the Justice Ministry is reportedly considering a proposal to export convicts to neighboring France and Germany.  Swiss prisons chief Thomas Freytag told public broadcaster SRF in a program aired late Friday that the country’s correctional facilities are at more than 100 percent capacity.

Prisons in the French-speaking cantons (states) of western Switzerland are said to be particularly overcrowded.  It’s unclear when the Justice Ministry would decide on the plan, and whether France or Germany would be prepared to let Swiss inmates do their time there.

Left out of this brief story is the basic fact that Switzerland, at recent count, has less than 7,000 prisoners in the whole country and an incarceration rate that is only about 1/8th of the incarceration rate in the United States. For comparison, consider that the US state of Virginia has a state-wide population that is a little lower than Switzerland’s, but it has more than 30,000 prisoners (and that count excludes a few thousand federal prisoners coming from Virginia).