International Prison Transfer Program

In our last column, we discussed the basics of extradition law and its increasing relevance in white-collar cases.¹ A related topic is the transfer of foreign citizens convicted in the United States to their home countries to serve their sentence, as in the case of the “NatWest Three”—three British businessmen who pled guilty in 2007 to Enron-related fraud charges in the U.S. District Court in Houston and served only six months in the United States before being transferred to the United Kingdom for the balance of their 37-month sentences.²

Treaties facilitating such transfers initially were formalized by the federal government in the 1960s and 70s to allow for the return of U.S. citizens convicted abroad to serve their sentence in the United States in response to concerns regarding their harsh treatment in foreign prisons. Today, these treaties are employed more frequently to transfer foreign nationals out of the United States in a wide variety of cases, including white-collar cases with cross-border implications.