Mixing Detention-Cultures: The Belgian-Dutch Case

Abstract

In 2009, the then Minister of Justice of Belgium, Stefaan De Clerck, struggled with a long-standing problem of serious prison overcrowding, whilst the Netherlands was closing down prisons due to a decreasing prison population. As the Penitentiary Institution of Tilburg (PI Tilburg), a prison in the Netherlands which is located near the Belgian border, was also facing closure and thus unemployment of its staff, this situation was taken as an opportunity to find a temporary solution for both governments’ penitentiary problems. An agreement between the two countries was set, and from February 2010 onwards Belgian inmates in prisons dispersed all over the country were gradually transferred to the Dutch PI Tilburg and were detained under Belgian penitentiary legislation and the Belgian prison regime. The PI Tilburg is run by Dutch staff under shared Belgian and Dutch governance. This has resulted in a unique encounter and melding of different legal regulations, prison regimes and cultures.