Dutch Lessons

 

Prisons at bursting point, insufficient staff to run them and maintenance backlogs threatening to make them unusable. This isn’t the UK but the Netherlands. A country not long ago renting out its unused facilities to other countries is now having to consider putting mattresses in cells to increase its own capacity.

Delegates at the ICPA Research Symposium in Belfast heard senior officials from the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security tell an all too familiar tale- prisons closed when numbers fell, sentences (particularly for drug offences) increasing in length and politicians loathe to spend the necessary financial and political capital needed to cope with the looming crisis let alone avert it.

Until now. The Dutch have embarked on developing a ten year strategy for a sustainable justice system- a kind of Gauke Review plus- looking not only at sentencing but at the drivers of crime, at public health and drug policies and at the shape of the correctional response that might be needed in the future. As the conference heard “the problem is too big for the prison system.” Delegates from England and Wales were left thinking if only we’d set up something like that.

The Dutch rate of imprisonment per hundred thousand of the population is still well under half what it is in England and Wales but like us the Netherlands is being forced to take some unpalatable short term measures.  These include using police cells and reopening some closed prison units.

In addition, there are currently 8,000 people sentenced to prison in the Netherlands who are at home. They are on a waiting list to serve their term when a space comes up.  

It’s not ideal in all sorts of ways but I’m surprised the so called prison queue has not been debated here as part of the plans to counter the prison capacity crisis which have been further laid out by the Lord Chancellor this week.

Could courts not be asked to keep out of prison all convicted offenders who have successfully spent their remand period in the community? If they do impose a custodial sentence, could it not be suspended, deferred, or postponed, depending on the circumstances?   

Perhaps Mr Gauke’s review, expected imminently, will propose it.