Kast Unveils 'Total Isolation' Prison Model Ahead of First State Address

President José Antonio Kast sat down with CNN Chile's Mónica Rincón just days before his first State of the Union address, ready to defend the direction of his young administration and settle some scores with his predecessor. The conversation ranged across security, immigration, and the political future of his coalition, but it was his prison policy that drew the sharpest focus—a model built on what he called total isolation of certain inmates, the details of which he promised to unveil on Monday.

On security broadly, Kast was unsparing in his criticism of Gabriel Boric's government. He acknowledged that his administration would continue working within the existing National Public Security Policy framework that Boric had established, but he framed that as a pragmatic choice rather than an endorsement. "A government can define a strategy and fail to execute it," he said, and by his accounting, that's exactly what happened. Crime statistics had climbed across the board—homicides, organized crime, drug trafficking, neighborhood violence. "All the indices went up," he stated flatly. The previous administration had set targets in immigration enforcement, narcotics prosecution, and gang suppression, he argued, and met none of them. Where Boric's government had failed, Kast suggested his own was advancing methodically, area by area.

When pressed on whether his State of the Union would announce prisons without visitation rights, Kast reframed the question into something larger: a wholesale redesign of the penitentiary system centered on maximum-security protocols. His security minister had already signaled that such measures were coming. But Kast was careful not to lock himself into a specific infrastructure model. The core principle, he explained, would be total isolation of certain inmate profiles—but whether that meant a single massive new prison, smaller facilities scattered across the country, or isolation units within existing prisons remained to be determined. "We're going to generate total isolation," he said. "If that's a megaprison, if it's inside existing prisons, or if it's new smaller prisons—that's something we'll define as we go."

On immigration, Kast faced a trickier rhetorical position. During his campaign, he had promised to expel 330,000 undocumented migrants—a figure he had later walked back as metaphorical, then as hyperbolic. Rincón asked him directly about the gap between that promise and reality. Kast doubled down on the underlying goal while softening the language. "We're going to get illegal immigrants to leave the country, whether voluntarily or by force," he said. "We're going to solve the problem step by step." He attributed the slower-than-promised pace to the infrastructure he had inherited—outdated digital systems, bureaucratic backlogs, the machinery of government left in disrepair by his predecessor. The first thing his administration had done, he noted, was close the borders. Everything else would follow in sequence.

The conversation turned finally to the political future of his coalition. Several of his ministers, particularly Martín Arrau, the security chief, had begun to look like potential presidential candidates for the next election cycle. Kast was asked whether he saw "presidential material" in Arrau. He demurred from singling anyone out, but he made clear he saw potential in multiple figures within his government and his broader coalition. "We have to develop many leaders," he said. He expressed hope that anyone who had served with distinction in his administration—whether in municipal office, as a governor, in Congress, or in the cabinet—would have the opportunity to present themselves to voters. The specific choice of a successor would come later, he suggested, once his coalition had time to assess who could best carry forward what he was confident would be a successful government.