California's governor has suggested relocating an estimated 20,000 prison inmates to Mexico as the state's overcrowded detention centers are adding to its financial problems amid an imminent bankruptcy.
Arnold Schwarzenegger maintains that by outsourcing prison care to Mexico, California can solve its prison crisis.
"I think that we can do so much better in the prison system alone if we can go and take inmates, for instance, the 20,000 inmates that are illegal immigrants that are here and get them to Mexico," Schwarzenegger said, according to AFP.
The governor says the state would pay Mexico to build and maintain the prison, which he says would save the state approximately 1 billion dollars.
Jorge-Mario Cabrera Valladares, from the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights in Los Angeles, thinks differently, saying the state is not going to solve the prison crisis by sending inmates to Mexico.
"We're not about to create a relationship where all of a sudden their society must now be worried about thousands of felons now in their backyard," Cabrera told Press TV's Ross Frasier.
California plans to release prisoners convicted of non-violent offenses.
According to Cabrera, a large number of the undocumented inmates fall under that category and should be released.
However, he maintains that it would be irresponsible of the state to send those inmates that have been arrested for violent crimes to another country.
"If there is a serious offense then they must pay the society where the offense took place. it should not be where we outsource even the caring of inmates," he said.
California, the world's eighth largest economy, is under a federal order to release 40,000 inmates over the next two years.
According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College in London, the United States has long had the world's largest prison population, followed by China and Russia.
The US incarceration rate on December 31, 2008 was 754 inmates per 100,000 residents, which amount to more than two million prisoners.
