Kristel Beyens

Prison Privatization: An International Perspective

It should be noted at the outset that private prisons are not a new phenomena. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contract and lease agreements between prison authorities and private entrepreneurs were common, either for the use of inmate labour, or for transportation. Public awareness of abuses, demands for better standards, objections from trade unions that jobs were taken up by prison workers and the adoption of rehabilitation as a major goal of punishment were the impetus for a change to a more centralized public system (McConville, 1987; Dilulio, 1990; Feeley, 1991; Moyle, 1993; Borna, 1986; Ryan and Ward, 1989a, 1989b).

From ‘Community Service’ to ‘Autonomous Work Penalty’ in Belgium. What's in a Name?

In Belgium, community service (dienstverlening) for adults was introduced in 1994 as a condition of probation at the sentencing level and as a condition of mediation at the prosecution level. It became the so-called ‘work penalty’ (werkstraf) in 2002. This change in the terminology and the legal and penological basis, from an alternative sanction embedded in a rehabilitative approach to just another neoclassical form of punishment primarily aiming for retribution, ushered in another sentencing practice and led to a rapid increase in the number of work penalties imposed. This article describes the legal provisions governing the ‘work penalty’ and the peculiarities of its implementation in practice. It explores the possible explanations of the success of this sentence and the implications of that success for its execution.

Using vignette methodology to research the process of breach comparatively

Comparative research related to any aspect of the process of breach in either the pre-trial, sentencing or release phases is relatively rare. Comparative studies of decision making in the specific context of breach process are particularly lacking. One reason for the dearth of research in this area is the many challenges presented by comparative research across different jurisdictions. This article focuses on the development of a vignette methodology to explore the decision-making aspect of the breach process from a comparative perspective across a number of different European jurisdictions. The vignettes are designed to explore the decision-making aspects of two different types of breach process – the process of breach that follows on from a breach of conditions of early release from prison and the process that follows a breach of conditions attached to the completion of an unpaid work order. The article begins by contextualizing the research in debates about the relationship between compliance, legitimacy and rising prison populations. It critically examines the nature of vignette methodology and then discusses the specific challenges of using vignettes in comparative research as well as the development, piloting and evaluation of the decision-making vignettes in focus. We conclude by discussing some of the challenges we faced and particularly our challenge in terms of the development of the methodology – enhancing the comparability of the findings.

Mixing Detention Cultures: The Belgian–Dutch Case

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.