France plans to build a prison in the middle of the Amazon rainforest to host some of its most dangerous criminals, according to France’s Justice Minister.
In an interview carried by Le Journal du Dimanche on Saturday, French Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin revealed that he plans to build France’s third-most secure prison 7,000 miles away from Paris in the French overseas territory of Guiana, where he was visiting when the interview took place.
The move has sparked an outcry from local officials and residents.
Darmanin says the 500-inmate facility will house drug traffickers and “Islamic radicals” in the northeast of South America.
Guiana, also known as French Guiana, is the only part of mainland South America that is still governed by a European nation.
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The $607m facility is supposed to open in 2028. It will be built in an isolated location surrounded by a thick forest of trees in the Amazon rainforest in the region of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, a town bordering Suriname, which once received prisoners shipped there by Napoleon III in the 19th century.
Some of these prisoners were also sent to the French penal colony of Cayenne, commonly known as Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana, which operated between 1852 and 1952 and was only closed in 1953.
Darmanin told Le Journal du Dimanche that the prison also aims to prevent drug traffickers from having contact with their criminal networks, limited contact with the outside world, regular searches, and constant electronic surveillance.
Baz Dreisinger, a professor at John Jay College of criminal justice in New York, who wrote Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World, told Middle East Eye that current incarceration policies were not being discussed enough.
“This banishment of people from one country to a prison in another is part of a long history of penal colonies and the fantasy you can exorcise and rid yourself of so-called criminals, normally poor people and undesirables of whatever variety. There’s a long history of this. It is not a new thing.”
Dreisenger added that this is an “act of political theatre”, as these countries are more than able to imprison people in their own lands.
“Of course, I think it’s influenced by Trump – his conversation of reopening Alcatraz and sending people to the prison in El Salvador. A lot is being shaped by US domestic policy.”
Cecot in El Salvador can hold up to 40,000 prisoners and is meant for permanent exile and permanent punishment. El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele bills the prison as the biggest in the Americas. It is also where the Trump administration has sent more than 200 Venezuelan migrants. It is described as a black hole from which no information escapes.
The French justice ministry had not responded to a request for comment by the time of publication.
