Eric Maes

Crime, criminal justice and criminology in Belgium

For criminologists, Belgium is at once an interesting and a very complex country. Belgium is one of the first European countries where criminology became institutionalized in the universities. As for criminal justice, in many ways Belgium can be situated in the European middle. One feature of Belgium is its institutional complexity, with a push towards devolving decision-making powers from the federal level to its entities. This recently led to the longest period of post-election government negotiations in a democratic country: for more than 500 days, the country had no real federal government. Current agreements on a future sixth reform of the federal state include devolving matters of justice to the regions and language-based communities. Moreover, since the mid-1990s Belgium has been going through a period of unprecedented criminal justice reform, in various key areas such as policing, the prison system and victim policy. However, the persistent overcrowding of Belgian prisons has hampered various reform efforts and has determined the course of penal policy in recent decades.

Sex/gender‐based decision‐making in the criminal justice system as a possible (additional) explanation for the underrepresentation of women in official criminal statistics — a review of international literature

This article represents an analysis of the literature on sex‐based selection processes in the criminal justice system. It is only since the feminist wave of the sixties that sexual discrimination has been considered as an issue of importance in the study of the criminal justice system and that female criminality has been looked at more thoroughly. The article deals with the different assumptions and hypotheses which have come forward in the debate on the possible discrimination of men and women in the criminal justice process. In the first part of the article the various theoretical models are outlined: the chivalry and evil women hypotheses, the legal or etiological model, the social control theory, the family‐based justice model, and a multifactoral model. In the second part of the article, the results of empirical research relevant to these hypotheses are presented. American, British, Belgian, Dutch and some German literature has been taken into account. The review of the literature shows that the chiv...

From Prison Sentence to Deprivation of Liberty. A Brief History of Two Centuries of Legal Regulation of the Belgian Prison Regime (1795-2006)

Since the end of World War II more and more attention is paid to the question of (the protection of ) prisoners’ rights. In 1956 the Belgian Director-General of the prison administration, Jean Dupréel, stated that imprisonment needed to be restricted to the deprivation of the ‘liberty to come and go’ and that prisoners should preserve all other fundamental rights, although only under certain strict conditions.1 Internationally and on the European level, the recognition and protection of prisoners’ rights were promoted too, through the drawing up and ratification of the ‘Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners’ (adopted on August 30th, 1955, by the First United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders) and the later European version of these rules (adopted by the Council of Europe in 1973, and revised in 1987 and 2006: the so-called ‘European Prison Rules’). Shortly after the Second World War, the Netherlands adopted prison legislation in which some prisoners’ rights (‘Beginselenwet Gevangeniswezen’,