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Most prisons tend to be located in fairly remote areas for a multitude of reasons. That is certainly the case with one that will be used to hold some prisoners from France who will soon be shipped off to a facility in the middle of the Amazon rainforest in an attempt to crack down on issues plaguing the country’s domestic system.
I feel like most people are aware that Australia experienced a population boom around the turn of the 19th century after Great Britain opted to use the continent as a penal colony, and it wasn’t the only empire that opted to ship some convicts overseas after sentencing them.
France was also a fan of the practice; many criminals were exiled to New Orleans in the early 1700s when the country still controlled the Louisiana Territory, and “Devil’s Island” in French Guiana was a notorious site that operated for around a century before it was shuttered in the 1950s.
Now, the country is revisiting that tactic by taking advantage of that remnant of colonialism as part of a new crackdown.
According to the BBC, French Guiana (the territory France continues to oversee on the northeastern coast of South America) has been tapped to serve as the location of a new high-security prison that will be situated “deep in the Amazon jungle in the northwestern region of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni.”
The prison, which could open as early as 2028, will be able to accommodate around 500 inmates and boast a wing reserved for especially high-risk offenders, with officials saying one of their primary goals is to “incapacitate the most dangerous drug traffickers” doing business in France.
The hope is that the remote location of the facility will make it difficult for those drug traffickers to keep in contact with the outside world while continuing to orchestrate their operations from behind bars—an issue prisons located in France have had trouble addressing due to the proliferation of illicit cellphones within their confines.
It’s certainly a bold strategy, but it does seem like one that could pay off if things go according to plan.
Content shared from brobible.com.