Sweden eyes sending inmates abroad as prisons full due to gang crime wave

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden can send criminals to serve their sentences in prisons abroad, a government-appointed commission said on Wednesday, as the country struggles to handle an influx of new inmates arising from a wave of gang crime.

"There is a need to work with new solutions within the Prison and Probation Service," Justice Minister Gunnar Strommer told a news conference, saying Sweden was already in talks with other countries about renting space in their prisons.

Sweden has been plagued by gang crime that has escalated over the last two decades and has seen the Nordic nation top the rankings of deadly gun violence per capita in Europe.

Armed with new legal tools and increased personnel and funding, Swedish police have made headway against the gangs - there have been fewer deadly shootings and more convictions over the last two years.

While that success has been welcomed, it has put a strain on the prison system. In 2023, the latest year for which records are available, Swedish courts handed down prison sentences totalling just under 200,000 months, a 25% increase from the previous year and a doubling compared with 2014.

Sweden's jails and prisons are full and the Prison and Probation Service says it will need about 27,000 beds by 2033, up from 11,000 today.

Mattias Wahlstedt, head of the commission, said there were no legal obstacles to Sweden renting prison slots abroad but that a proposal to that end would have to pass parliament first.

Authorities have also been grappling with an unprecedented spate of bombings, primarily in the Stockholm capital region. In January alone there have been 30 bombings, most of them acts of extortion by gangs against companies and citizens, police said.

(Reporting by Johan Ahlander and Anna Ringstrom; editing by Mark Heinrich)