In March 2025, the Trump administration gathered over , primarily Venezuelans, and transported them to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). This was a forceful action—made even more devastating by the fact that, merely four months after the U.S.’s initiative, was adopted as a model for detaining individuals in other nations. The U.S. has currently committed $6 million to CECOT, where individuals are held in cells designed for 65 to 70 occupants. (This week, the granted the Trump administration approval to continue forcibly sending migrants to third countries without further due process.)
The U.S.’s agreement with CECOT is, in its own right, unprecedented (). However, it highlights a consistent pattern. The U.S. possesses a detailed history of disseminating and influencing global punishment strategies.
What is observed in El Salvador today is not an anomaly, but rather the outcome of precedents established since America’s founding.
The U.S. equipped its first penitentiary with running water before the White House; the infrastructure for punishment has consistently been prioritized over that of democracy. Opened in 1829, Philadelphia’s (ESP) emphasized supervision and control through its panopticon layout, which maximized the capacity for a small group of correctional officers to monitor a large population of incarcerated individuals. “It was considered a modern marvel,” states Baz Dreisinger, the scholar, , and Executive Director of . “Over 350 prisons globally are modeled after it.”
Punishment in this nation—the intense focus on state-sanctioned force as a means of ensuring safety—has never been merely a domestic concern.
In Dreisinger’s book, Incarceration Nations, she elaborates on how, following the establishment of facilities like ESP, “nineteenth-century European scholars made prison tours an essential stop on their trans-Atlantic visits,” from Fredrick William IV of Prussia, among the earliest visitors, to leaders and commissioners in France, Russia, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden. American prisons soon “integrated themselves into the fabric of global culture,” she remarks.
Well into the 20th century, U.S. correctional facilities served as a conduit for advancements in punitive methods. The U.S. continued to implement the concept of solitary confinement as “penance,” most notably in isolated units such as Alcatraz’s “D-Block.” Yet, it wasn’t until the 1960s that the U.S. constructed its : minimal human interaction and recreation, limited natural light, and scarce to no educational or employment opportunities are some defining features of the psychological and physical brutality that served as a prototype for others.
In 1963, the Federal Bureau of Prisons established its inaugural supermax facility, USP Marion in Illinois, operating with a 23-hour-a-day isolation protocol. As the influence of the supermax expanded domestically——the model also permeated punitive objectives abroad. Dreisinger cites Brazil’s Penitenciária Federal de Catanduvas, built in 2007, as a “segment of the United States [supermax] transported to foreign lands.” (Brazil possesses in terms of incarceration rates). “The moment I saw it,” Dreisinger recounts, “I almost forgot which country I was in.” The scholar further explains that these supermax variations exist in other nations as well, such as how New Zealand’s Auckland Prison in its planning documents and the American Correctional Association (ACA) promotes its publication as a primary reference guide for corrections internationally.
Beyond these instances of the U.S. providing a blueprint for carceral practices, the country has also directly invested in broader strategies for criminalization internationally. “Police have become frontline U.S. diplomats,” explains Stuart Schrader, a scholar of race and policing, and the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. “Police diplomacy cultivates police camaraderie.”
In El Salvador, for example, serves as a current policing export. Ten minutes away is the International Tactical Training Association, established by a Chicago officer “after the State Department ceased government assistance to a specialized Salvadoran police unit linked to death squads,” Schrader states.
Regarding incarceration infrastructure and perceived “success” abroad, the U.S. exported both the concept of as well as the overseen by the ACA. There was minimal resistance to expanding profit-driven privatization globally. As for ACA accreditation, it “validates” facilities and often . Since ACA accreditation exists internationally, it is consequently probable that this would increase the likelihood of those countries receiving financial support.
This process can be costly. The Department of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs . (Since the initial award, the contract’s value has decreased to approximately $2 million). A revealed that “accreditation has little to no correlation with detention facility conditions and practices” and is instead “a mere endorsement of dangerous facilities.” It also demonstrated that ACA fees, paid by the institutions it audits, constitute nearly half of the association’s revenue. These ACA certificates are distributed across prisons in Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Dubai, Colombia, and the UAE—demonstrating the extensive degree to which the U.S. has influenced carceral systems abroad. released by the agency proudly states that “there is no doubt” they are “a global organization with work and influence that has stretched over the years to every major part of the world.”
The United States establishes the standard for criminalization, frequently acting as a primary external source of financial backing in numerous countries. This encompasses everything from the construction and renovation of prisons and youth detention centers to plea-bargaining reforms that encourage bail and pre-trial detention. In 2022 alone, the United States“The United States has an interest in other countries possessing robust prison systems and police forces because we perceive it as a means of preventing instability at our borders,” Dreisinger explains. However, these very systems often perpetuate harm and the precise instability the U.S. ostensibly aims to avoid. “We are exporting the issue, but we are not exporting well-considered solutions—and we could be,” Dreisinger adds.
It is crucial to remember that our present situation is not simply a result of authoritarian opportunism, but a consequence of years of legislation and financial commitment to global prison systems. And yet, administrations, both past and present, consistently depict violence as isolated or individual—never systemic, never historical. Nevertheless, the centuries-long expansion of punitive tactics domestically and internationally has led us to our harsh reality—and it is only set to spread further.