Prison visitation is important for protecting against social isolation during imprisonment. It is also essential for maintaining contacts that are important for life in prison and after release. It is therefore not surprising that both nationally and internationally important policy measures and scientific research have been undertaken on the topic. Nationally, however, limited scientific research is available regarding how many, how often and from whom prisoners receive visits, how visits are experienced and the possible effects of visitation, thus leaving many questions unanswered. Meanwhile, in the past ten years great changes have been made to visitation in Dutch prison policy and practice. Given these recent developments, both scientists and practitioners could benefit from an overview of the current state of affairs of visitation. This article aims to bridge the gap between research, policy and practice by summarizing findings from the Life in Custody study. This study includes a description of how visitation is organized legally, at the policy level and in practice, a thorough review of prior research on visitation and an analysis of the most recent national data on the prevalence and frequency of visitation, while considering important differences between prisoners and prisons.

The Life In Custody-study is a large scale, prospective panel study, aimed to examine the quality of prison life in The Netherlands. This paper describes the LIC-study by giving a detailed overview of the data collection procedure, and strategies to optimize response, and presents the first nationwide results on prison climate in The Netherlands. Results show that the data collection procedures utilized were successful in obtaining a high response rate (which was an exceptional 81%) and reaching a representative group of prisoners. Furthermore, results show that the perceptions of prison climate vary across prison regimes, and to a lesser extent across age groups and time spent in detention.

#MeToo has played a significant role in the struggle to confront taboos around sexual violence, including the acknowledgment of male rape victims. In this article, the authors have examined reactions at three different moments in time (T1, T2, T3) to Dutch journalist Jelle Brandt Corstius, who shared his #MeToo experience via Twitter. The article shows that the Belief in a Just World, victim stereotypes and rape myths seem particularly useful concepts to examine different positive (supporting, compensating) and negative (blaming, distancing) observer reactions. Reactions are most negative at T2, when JBC’s case least adheres to stereotypes and rape scripts.

Around 36.000 men enter Dutch prisons every year. Nearly half of them are father. Imprisonment is destructive to father involvement. Many prisoners involuntary fail to stay connected with their family and are unable to reconnect with family after release. However, father involvement protects fragile families, children and fathers themselves from collateral consequences of imprisonment and even reduces recidivism. One of the first Dutch initiatives for fathers in prison came from voluntary organization Exodus. Since 2014, they run an 8-week workshop on fatherhood in a number of Dutch penal institutions. Fathers work on the restoration or reconstruction of their relationship with their children and parenting partners. In this article, we review participating fathers’ perceptions of the workshop and the changes in their attitude towards fatherhood.

Half of Dutch police has no confidence in the criminal justice system. Police officers complain that it is impossible to tackle crime and disorder, because as they believe, prosecutors and judges are often letting them down. This article discusses an empirical study on police attitudes towards criminal law in The Netherlands. It is found that many police officers don’t know much about the legal proceedings that follow police work. A description is presented of how police officers think about legal questions: conviction, sentencing and detention on remand. It is concluded that there is a tension between on the one hand, the operation goals of order following a moral duty to restore street justice, and the protection of legal rights of individual citizens on the other. Subsequent recommendations have to do with the working relationship between police and the judiciary.

A survey of the literature suggested that low participation rates in prison-based rehabilitation programs in The Netherlands can be explained by a lack of treatment readiness amongst rehabilitation candidates and participants. The current contribution aims to examine treatment readiness amongst detainees that have been assigned a candidate for a prison-based rehabilitation program in the Netherlands. To address these aims, data were used from the fourth wave of a research project studying the effects of imprisonment on the life of detainees in the Netherlands. Results showed that about eighty percent of treatment candidates were not treatment ready. This lack of treatment readiness amongst potential participants will no doubt influence both treatment engagement numbers, which studies have shown to be low, and quite possible treatment effectiveness. Results imply that practitioners should be aware of the absence of treatment readiness amongst a large part of their clients. Assessment and (if necessary) interventions to increase treatment readiness amongst candidates and participants seems of the utmost importance.