One of the prisons in the village of Veenhuizen may soon close forever
While most countries in the world rack their brains over how to deal with prison overcrowding, the Netherlands is trying to solve the opposite problem. There is a shortage of prisoners, so much so that over the past few years authorities have had to close 19 prisons, and several more will be closed next year. A journalist from BBC investigated why this happened.
The smell of fried onions rises up the metal staircase and drifts along the corridor past cell doors. Downstairs, in the kitchen, prisoners are preparing dinner. One of them, skillfully working with a serrated knife, chops vegetables.
"I have six years to hone my skills, so I'm practicing," he says. It's a noisy business, because the knife is chained to the countertop with a long steel chain. "They can't take the knife with them," says Jan Roelof van der Spool, deputy director of the maximum-security prison "Norgerhaven" in the northeast of the Netherlands. "But they are allowed to take small kitchen knives in exchange for personal passes, so we know exactly who has what."
Some of the prisoners are here for violent crimes, and the very idea of them walking around with knives might seem frightening. However, culinary training is just one way to help inmates acquire a profession after their release.
"Here in Holland, we take an individual approach," explains van der Spool. "If someone has a drug problem, we help overcome the addiction; if a person has fits of aggression, we provide special therapy; if people have money problems, they get help from financial advisors. We try to eliminate all possible reasons that led them to crime. Of course, the prisoner himself must want to change, but our methods have proven effective. Over 10 years we have achieved great success and continue to improve."
Some repeat offenders, whom van der Spool says are called "revolving doors" in prisons, now get two-year sentences, and special re-education programs are developed for them. After that, less than 10% end up back behind bars.
In the Norgerhaven prison and the very similar Esserheem prison, located in the same village of Veenhuizen, many cells are empty. In the exercise yards, which are no smaller than four football fields, trees grow, picnic tables stand, and volleyball nets are hung. Van der Spool emphasizes that fresh air reduces stress for both prisoners and guards. Inmates are allowed to go to the library, canteen, and hospital unescorted. This independence, according to prison authorities, helps them better adapt to life outside prison walls after they leave.
Just 10 years ago, the percentage of prisoners in the Netherlands was among the highest in Europe, but today it is one of the lowest: 57 per 100,000 population. For example, in England and Wales, there are 148 prisoners per 100,000. However, successful rehabilitation is not the only reason for the sharp decline in the number of inmates in Dutch prisons, which has dropped by as much as 43% since 2005.
In part, the 2005 peak was related to increased security measures at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, where the number of cocaine courier arrests rose sharply. According to Pauline Schuyt, professor of criminal law at Leiden University, the police now have new priorities. "They shifted attention from drugs to combating human trafficking and terrorism," the professor explains. Moreover, Dutch judges often sentence offenders to community service, fines, and electronic monitoring instead of prison time.
According to the director of the Dutch prison system, Angelina van Dijk, prisons are increasingly used to hold extremely dangerous criminals or, conversely, those offenders who need help and protection from prison authorities. "Sometimes it's better for people to stay at work, with their families, and serve punishment in another way," explains Angelina van Dijk. "In Holland, prison sentences are getting shorter, and the crime rate is falling, and this leads to prisons becoming empty."
However, although the crime rate has fallen by 25% over the past 8 years, critics of the system say that in fact people have simply become less likely to report crimes because many police stations have closed due to cost-cutting. Other critics, such as Madeleine van Toorenburg, a former prison director and now a spokeswoman for the opposition Christian Democratic Appeal party on criminal law, links the shortage of prisoners to a low crime detection rate. "The police are overworked and cannot cope with the volume," van Toorenburg asserts. "And how does the government react? It closes prisons! Isn't that amazing?"
One thing is clear: many of Angelina van Dijk's subordinates are not happy about the reduction in the number of prisoners. According to Frans Karbo, a representative of the prison guards' union, his colleagues are "unhappy and a bit depressed." He says that young people do not want to work in prisons "because they see no future in this job, since no one knows when their prison will be closed."
True, one of the empty prisons in the south of Amsterdam was turned into a successful hotel, where the most expensive rooms are named "Lawyer," "Judge," "Director," and "Prison Guard." In others, turned into temporary refugee centers, work was also found for former guards. The desire to preserve jobs in prisons led to another unexpected solution: "importing" prisoners from Norway and Belgium.
“Our foreign minister met with the Norwegian justice minister and offered to rent empty cells,” says Jan Roelof van der Spol. Thus, in September last year, Norway began sending its prisoners to serve their sentences in the Nørgerhaven prison. Now the director of this prison is a Norwegian, Carl Hillesland, but the prisoners are guarded by 234 Dutch guards.
Hillesland, a courteous former bookseller with a bushy beard, does not look like a prison warden. True, unlike his Dutch colleagues, he is dressed in an impeccable green uniform with epaulets, but by his own admission, the regime in Norwegian prisons is much more liberal than in the Netherlands. For example, Norwegian prisoners are allowed to give interviews to journalists and watch video films of their choice, because the principle of “normalization” dominates the country’s penitentiary system. In other words, life in prison should be as close as possible to life outside, so that former prisoners can more easily reintegrate into society.
“Some things we really do differently,” explains van der Spol. “For instance, we immediately punish a prisoner for violating rules, while the Norwegians first conduct an investigation and then wait before applying punishment. At first, our guards could not get used to this style. But overall,” sums up Hillesland, “we hold similar views on how a prison should work.”
According to him, some prisoners had to be transferred from Norway by force, but most agreed voluntarily, partly because prices for groceries and tobacco are lower in Holland. Another attractive element in Nørgerhaven prison was a special room for Skype conversations. Relatives wishing to visit prisoners must pay for travel and accommodation out of their own pocket, which is at least 500 euros. However, many of the prisoners serving long sentences are foreigners who rarely had the opportunity to meet with relatives even in Norway.
Mikhail’s cell is decorated with photos of the football club he supports and his four young children. This welder from northern Poland received a sentence in Norway, but there he did not have access to Skype. “My wife is raising four children and is afraid of losing her job, and anyway she doesn’t have the money to come see me,” says Mikhail. “So I chose this prison myself so that I could sometimes see them, not just hear their voices on the phone.”
Leaving the prison through the metal gates that clang shut behind me, I think about what will happen to Nørgerhaven after these gates close behind the last Norwegian in a few years. The guards know that one of the Veenhuizen prisons, Nørgerhaven or Esserheem, will be closed next year. But how likely is it that the number of prisoners in Holland will start to grow? It’s enough to walk through the village to understand that in the past the Netherlands held many people in prisons.
Veenhuizen is located in the remote and sparsely populated province of Drenthe, famous for peat bogs and heathlands. Here, in “Dutch Siberia,” in the 19th century, urban beggars, vagrants, street children, and other “undesirable elements” were sent. An army general founded a reform colony in Veenhuizen, hoping to eradicate poverty. Over time, this colony grew into a settlement that remained closed to the outside world until the 1980s.
According to demographers, one million of today’s 17-million population of Holland are descendants of people exiled to Veenhuizen. “This is a huge part of the population,” says writer Suzanne Jansen, whose grandfather was exiled to Veenhuizen for begging. “Any of us could have been born and raised in poverty, in difficult conditions, so I think we should always remember those who are behind bars today.”