The Prison Trade: Interstate Compacts and Prisoner Swaps

The prisoner trade is the collection of legal arrangements that let governments move incarcerated people across borders they did not choose to cross. Inside the United States, it runs on interstate corrections compacts that allow one state to house its inmates in another state’s prisons, often thousands of miles from home. Between countries, it takes two very different forms: a formal treaty program for transferring prisoners to serve sentences in their home nations, and the high-profile diplomatic swaps that trade detainees as geopolitical leverage. The common thread is that corrections officials and diplomats, not the prisoners themselves, decide where a sentence is served.

How States Move Prisoners Across State Lines

The main legal vehicle is the Interstate Corrections Compact, a national agreement authorizing prison officials to contract with other states for the custody, treatment, and rehabilitation of inmates. Forty jurisdictions have joined, including 38 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal prison system, most signing on in the 1970s and early 1980s.¹² Regional compacts cover specific areas as well, with 17 states participating in agreements like the Western Corrections Compact and the New England Corrections Compact. Sixteen states have additional statutes supplementing the framework, and 13 cite formal corrections department policy as another source of transfer authority.³

Under the national compact, the sending state keeps legal jurisdiction over the inmate while the receiving state acts as its agent. Transferred prisoners are supposed to retain the same rights and face the same obligations as if they had stayed home, and they must be returned to the sending state for release unless the parties agree otherwise. Most routine transfers happen on a reciprocal “bookkeeping-only” basis with no money changing hands, though transfers into Federal Bureau of Prisons custody typically carry a per diem fee.³

Several thousand people are transferred out of their state of conviction each year.⁴ Prison officials make the final call, though requests can come from the inmate or other parties. Common stated reasons include moving someone closer to family, managing gang affiliations, separating high-profile prisoners from general populations, and witness protection.¹

Why States Ship Inmates Out

The driving force behind most long-distance transfers is overcrowding, usually paired with cost. Small states with limited prison capacity have leaned on the system for decades. Vermont has been sending inmates out of state since the late 1990s, cycling them through facilities in Arizona, Kentucky, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania. As of mid-2026, roughly 150 Vermonters are held at the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Mississippi, a private prison run by CoreCivic under a contract that allows for up to 300 beds. Housing someone there costs about $36,000 per year, compared with roughly $114,000 per year in Vermont.⁵

Hawaii’s version is more extreme. The state began sending inmates to mainland private prisons in 1995, calling it temporary at the time. Three decades later, about 1,000 Hawaiian inmates are held at the Saguaro Correctional Facility in Eloy, Arizona, roughly 3,000 miles from home.⁶ California at one point had about 9,500 inmates in out-of-state private facilities in Arizona, Michigan, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, with per diem rates starting around $61 per inmate.⁷ California’s Department of Corrections eventually moved to end those contracts, calling the return of inmates “sound public policy” and projecting $318 million in savings.⁸

The receiving facilities are overwhelmingly operated by two private companies, CoreCivic and the GEO Group, which run the out-of-state beds used by Vermont, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, and others.⁹

What Transferred Inmates Lose

The paper promise that transferred inmates keep the same rights they had at home runs into the reality of distant, lower-budget private facilities. An October 2011 riot at the North Fork Correctional Facility in Oklahoma, which held California inmates, involved more than 600 prisoners and sent four to the hospital; investigators pointed to understaffing, security failures, and housing rival gang members together. A 2010 Inspector General audit of CCA facilities holding California inmates found inadequate staff training, no comprehensive criminal background checks for new hires, broken cameras, no alarm systems, and staff wearing clothing indistinguishable from inmate uniforms. At Tallahatchie, auditors found a ten-inch gap under a restricted-area gate large enough for a person to crawl through. Staff at these private facilities earned about $14 per hour, less than half the roughly $32 per hour paid to state correctional officers.⁷

The most immediate harm is separation from family. Research consistently shows visitation reduces recidivism, yet a facility hundreds or thousands of miles away makes visits unaffordable for most families.⁸ Critics of the Hawaii arrangement note that the distance severs connections to land, culture, and family.⁶ In Vermont, two inmates died at Tallahatchie in 2026 alone: one was found dead in segregation in January, and another was pronounced dead after a medical response in May.⁵

Legal access suffers too. Transfer alters the legal infrastructure surrounding an inmate, leaving prisoners and their lawyers unsure which jurisdiction is responsible for administrative and post-conviction relief.⁴ A Vermont court found in 2014 that the state’s practice of transferring only male prisoners out of state violated equal protection under the Vermont Constitution, since it severed those men from contact with their minor children while women in the state’s sole women’s prison faced no equivalent disruption.⁹

Can an Inmate Refuse to Be Transferred?

Generally, no. The Supreme Court settled the core question in Olim v. Wakinekona (1983), involving a maximum-security Hawaii inmate transferred to Folsom State Prison in California. The Court held that an interstate prison transfer, by itself, does not deprive an inmate of any liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause. Confinement in another state falls within the “normal limits or range of custody” authorized by a criminal conviction, just as transfer within a state does.¹⁰¹¹

The ruling built on Meachum v. Fano (1976), which gave prison officials wide discretion to transfer any prisoner for any reason or no reason, so long as the state has not enacted rules constraining that discretion. Hawaii’s regulations required a hearing before transfer but set no substantive limits on the administrator’s final decision, and procedural steps alone do not create a substantive right.¹²¹⁰

Later cases carved out narrow exceptions. In Wilkinson v. Austin (2005), the Court found that transfer to Ohio’s supermax facility did implicate a liberty interest, because indefinite placement and ineligibility for parole constituted an “atypical and significant hardship” under the standard from Sandin v. Conner (1995).¹² In Vitek v. Jones (1980), the Court held that transferring a prisoner to a mental hospital requires a hearing because it carries stigma and consequences beyond what a prison sentence authorizes.¹¹ For routine interstate transfers between prisons, the law remains where Olim left it.

Federal Prisoners and the 500-Mile Rule

Federal inmates have one statutory protection their state counterparts lack. The FIRST STEP Act of 2018 requires the Bureau of Prisons to house inmates as close to their primary residence as practicable, ideally within 500 driving miles.¹³ A September 2025 Inspector General audit found the BOP falling well short, with about 41 percent of evaluated inmates in the contiguous United States housed more than 500 driving miles from home. The audit also found the agency had been measuring straight-line distance rather than driving miles, undercounting the distance for over 8,600 inmates and overstating its compliance in reports to Congress between 2020 and 2025. In a sample of 100 placement decisions, 26 percent lacked sufficient documentation explaining why a closer facility was not used. Regional gaps compound the problem, particularly in the northwest and north central United States, and 69 percent of Native American inmates were housed beyond the 500-mile threshold. The BOP has acknowledged the deficiency and is building a new database system expected to be operational by December 2026.¹⁴

Prisoner Transfers Between Countries

The international side of the prisoner trade splits into two separate systems.

The Treaty-Based Transfer Program

The United States has run a formal international prisoner transfer program since 1977, administered by the Department of Justice under 18 U.S.C. §§ 4100–4115. It allows foreign nationals in U.S. federal custody to return home to serve the rest of their sentences, and allows Americans imprisoned abroad to do the same. As of 2018, the U.S. maintained transfer treaty relationships with 83 countries and territories through 12 bilateral treaties and two multilateral conventions.¹⁵¹⁶

Transfer is not a right. Both countries and the prisoner must consent. The inmate must have at least six months remaining on the sentence, must have been convicted of conduct that is also a crime in the receiving country, and must have no pending appeals. A federal magistrate judge then holds a consent verification hearing to confirm the prisoner understands the consequences and is agreeing voluntarily. Once the transfer is complete, the receiving country takes exclusive jurisdiction and administers the sentence under its own parole and credit rules.¹⁶

Diplomatic Prisoner Swaps

The more visible form of international exchange sits entirely outside any treaty. Diplomatic swaps are negotiated case by case, driven by political leverage rather than legal process. The largest recent example came on August 1, 2024, when the United States, Russia, and five other countries carried out a 24-prisoner exchange in Ankara, Turkey, the biggest U.S.-Russia swap since the Cold War. Those returned to the West included Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, and Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza. Russia’s central demand was Vadim Krasikov, an FSB officer serving a life sentence in Germany for the 2019 assassination of a Chechen dissident in Berlin.¹⁷¹⁸

The deal required extensive multilateral coordination. Vice President Kamala Harris met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob at the Munich Security Conference in February 2024 to discuss the prisoners held in their countries.¹⁷ The inclusion of Russian dissidents in the package reportedly gave Scholz the political cover he needed to approve Krasikov’s release.¹⁹ Negotiations were complicated by the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who had reportedly been days away from inclusion.¹⁸

Diplomatic swaps have continued under the Trump administration. A White House fact sheet from September 2025 claimed the administration had secured the release of 72 detained Americans, including Marc Fogel from Russia in February 2025, an American ballet dancer freed from a Russian penal colony in April 2025, and multiple Americans held by Hamas and the Taliban.²⁰ In September 2025, Trump signed an executive order creating a “state sponsors of wrongful detention” designation, empowering the State Department to impose sanctions on countries that hold Americans as bargaining chips. Administration officials identified China, Afghanistan, Iran, and Russia as potential targets.²¹

1
UNC School of Government. Interstate Corrections Compact
2
The Council of State Governments. Interstate Corrections Compact
3
Prison Policy Initiative. Interstate Transfer of Prison Inmates in the United States
4
Columbia Human Rights Law Review. Far From Home: Interstate Corrections Compacts
5
Vermont Public. Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Visiting Vermonters Held in a Mississippi Prison
6
National Library of Medicine. Hawaii Prisoner Transfers to Mainland Facilities
7
Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Out of State Transfers
8
U.S. Department of Justice. Collateral Consequences of Interstate Transfer of Prisoners
9
Prison Legal News. Vermont’s Policy of Sending Prisoners Out of State Found Unconstitutional
10
Justia. Olim v. Wakinekona, 461 U.S. 238
11
Legal Information Institute. Olim v. Wakinekona, 461 U.S. 238
12
Congress.gov. Fourteenth Amendment: Prisoners and Procedural Due Process
13
Federal Bureau of Prisons. Inmate Designations and Computation
14
Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General. Audit of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Efforts to Place Inmates Close to Home
15
U.S. Department of Justice. International Prisoner Transfer Unit
16
U.S. Department of Justice. Justice Manual: International Prisoner Transfers
17
NPR. Russia Prisoner Swap: Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan
18
CNN. Who Are the Detainees in the Russia-US Prisoner Swap
19
Harvard Program on Negotiation. Crisis Negotiation Lessons: The US-Russia Prisoner Swap
20
The White House. Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Strengthens Efforts to Protect U.S. Nationals From Wrongful Detention Abroad
21
Courthouse News Service. Trump Signs Order to Designate Nations That Hold Americans as Sponsors of Wrongful Detention