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Afghan refugee Shazia Lutfi, 19, peeks through the door of
her room at the former prison of De Koepel in Haarlem, Netherlands, on May 7.
(Muhammed Muheisen/AP)
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If you were to visit a prison in the Netherlands anytime
soon, you might find it surprisingly empty. Just this week, the Dutch Justice
Ministry announced that the total number of inmates held in Dutch prisons fell
by 27 percent between 2011 and 2015. To put the Dutch situation into an
American context, a 27 percent drop in the U.S. prison population would mean
the release of almost 600,000 people.
That's roughly the population of Milwaukee.
The situation in the Netherlands would seem to buck a
broader and longer global trend of rising prison populations. In February, the
Institute for Criminal Policy Research published a report that estimated the
world's prison population had grown by almost 20 percent between 2000 and 2015,
a margin above the 18 percent growth in the general population during that
period.
In its own report, the Dutch prison ministry notes that it
now has one of the lowest incarceration rates in Europe, with 57 out of 100,000
citizens imprisoned, second only to Finland at 54 per 100,000. England and
Wales had the highest in Europe at 148 per 100,000, the report noted, though
even that lags far behind the rate in United States, which was recently
estimated at 693 per 100,000.
The latest decline in the Dutch prison population can be
attributed to both a changing environment and changing tactics. The country's
crime rate has dipped by about 0.9 percent a year during the past few years. At
the same time, there has also been a switch toward using community service
sentences and ankle-bracelet monitoring systems. These changes have led to an
especially notable drop in the number of under-17-year-olds placed in youth
detention (55 percent) as well as 18- to 22-year-olds placed in the general
prison population (44 percent).
The decline in the use of prisons has led to the closure of
a number of them. In 2013, 19 prisons in the country were shut. In March, De
Telegraaf reported that a further five were likely to close. Meanwhile, prisons
that sit empty have been put to different uses. The country has rented out
unused prisons to the Norwegian and Belgian governments to house their own
prisoners. Some empty prisons have even been used to house refugees and
migrants.
"The rooms are intended for one or two people, there
are often gyms, a good kitchen," Janet Helder, a board member with the
Dutch government agency responsible for housing asylum seekers, told the
Associated Press earlier this year. "So in that sense, they tick many of
the boxes we are looking at."
However, it's not necessarily just good news. If nothing
else, the closure of prisons creates complications for those employed in the
prisons. De Telegraaf reports that the closure of five prisons this year would
make 1,900 people redundant and that a further 700 would be found jobs
elsewhere. There's also considerable debate in the Netherlands about whether
there are truly fewer criminals at work or if policing reforms over the past
few years have led to fewer criminals actually being caught.
"If the government truly worked to catch criminals, we
would not have this problem of empty cells," Socialist Party member of
parliament Nine Kooiman said in March.
The Netherlands isn't the only country seeing a dip in
prison populations. Sweden's prison population fell from 5,722 in 2004 to 4,500
in 2014, and the country has also had to close some underused prisons. Experts
who spoke to the Guardian in 2013 suggested that the humane and comfortable
nature of Swedish prisons had led to a better chance of rehabilitation for
prisoners.
-Washington Post
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