Worldwide, at least 1,900 Dutch prisoners are housed in foreign detention every year. Although previous research describes this group of prisoners and the conditions of their detention, it is unknown to what extent they reoffend after returning to the Netherlands. A unique dataset with data of 690 Dutch people has been used. They are supervised during their foreign detention by the International Office, part of the Dutch Probation Service. The results show that 23% of this group reoffended within two years. Furthermore, the probability of reoffending differs for the country of detention, age, way of return and prior incarcerations.

The contribution of sport to reintegrating offenders receives limited attention, both in science and in the practice of probation and the prison system. From the perspective of desistance, this literature study concluded that sport can contribute to the development of individual capital, social capital and an alternative identity. However, the effect of sport is not necessarily positive. There are risks of negative influence or the reinforcement of problem behaviour. In counselling offenders, sport should be combined with other interventions to reduce recidivism. A personalized approach is required, based on the risk-need-responsivity model.

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.

An exceptionally high prevalence of financial debt problems can be found among prisoners, but criminological knowledge on the link between debts and crime is limited. Previous studies are hindered by a lack of information on types of debts, informal debts and background characteristics. This article provides first and detailed insights in the types and amount of debts during and after prison in the Netherlands. Based on data from the Prison Project we show that the majority of prisoners report having debts during prison, show how different types of debts are related and how these debts change six months after release.

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.

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.

In the ‘participation society’ it is expected that citizens actively contribute to solving societal problems, including health care, immigration and security issues. A somewhat similar responsibilisation culture is visible in prisons, where prisoners are held responsible for their own rehabilitation. This article problematizes the way in which prisoners’ agency is promoted in Dutch prisons, considering prisoners’ constrained agency and the normative expectations that are tied to the approach. This critique is advanced through discussion of the promotion/demotion system that has been used in Dutch prisons since 2014. This system, comparable to the Incentives and Earned Privileges system in England and Wales, espouses both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ behavioural norms. The soft behavioural norms reflect a citizenship ideal that extends beyond compliance with the law. It is argued that these normative expectations tied to agency have a limiting effect on prisoners’ autonomy. This article argues in favour of a shift from the citizenship ideal to an autonomy ideal, which applies the principle of minimum restrictions. Furthermore, access to education, reintegration courses and contact with family should be treated as a right, rather than a privilege, in order to maximise autonomy and minimise the harmful effects of imprisonment.

Executive functions (EF) are higher order brain functions that are crucial for self-regulation, which may be negatively influenced by an impoverished environment. Since prison can be characterized as an impoverished environment, we studied whether EF and self-regulation decline during imprisonment. While EF are already often impaired in antisocial and criminal populations, we found a decline in attention and self-regulation after three months of imprisonment. We discuss the implications of our findings regarding recidivism and propose to aim for an improvement in executive functions during imprisonment, by enriching the prison environment.

This contribution summarizes findings from the Prison Project on the longitudinal course of mental health problems during imprisonment. The findings illustrate that prisoners experience high levels of mental health problems. Shortly after their arrival in detention, a quarter of them experienced a high level of mental health problems, which is five times as high as men in the general population. Prisoners’ mental health problems decreased during imprisonment. Both characteristics of the correctional environment (e.g. a fair and respectful treatment by prison staff) and pre-existing characteristics of the prisoners (e.g. personality traits) are related to the course of mental health problems in detention.

This study focuses on a sample of 28 male long-term prisoners in the Netherlands who are about to return to society. The aims of the study are to examine their future expectations regarding criminal behavior and to explore how social and individual factors, such as employment, family support and agency, relate to these expectations. This is important because such expectations may affect their actual (criminal) behavior after release. Pre-release semi-structured in-depth interviews included questions about their future expectations, social ties, and sense of agency. Prisoners expecting to quit with criminal activities had both close social ties to society and scored high on individual factors.

This article discusses the importance of reflection for prison staff. Their work is both physical and emotionally incriminating. That increases risk on turnover, burn-out, psychosomatic diseases and negative experiences with prisoners. To render all challenges in their work it’s important to build up resiliency. One of the means to stimulate resilience is organized reflection. It is described how guided by experts, reflecting on own experiences can contribute to resilience of prison employees and strengthen their learning capacity. That is done by literature study and a description of experiences with organized reflection in PI Vught.

This article deals with the topic of the life imprisonment in the Netherlands. The court Noord-Nederland judged that life imprisonment in the Netherlands doesn’t meet the criteria of the ECtHR, especially the ‘prospect of release of life prisoners. In this article I place the court’s decision in a context of national law and case-law (national, and international). In my opinion, there is still a prospect of release, because of the many independent judicial bodies and procedures that are involved to the decision to grant (or not) a pardon and the new developments in the penitentiary law.

In the Netherlands, the judge has the possibility to impose an entirely or partly suspended sentence. In this article, the perspective of judges and public prosecutors on the deterrent effect of the suspended sentence is investigated. For that purpose, 1000 court decisions were examined, and 15 judges and 15 public prosecutors were interviewed. The results show that the suspended sentence provides opportunities to intervene in the offender’s life regarding issues that are supposed to be related to recidivism. Judges and public prosecutors regard the suspended sentence as an important device to reduce the recidivism risk.

A substantial number of children are confronted with the detention of their mothers. Empirical research shows that these children’s well-being is seriously affected, although no study has been able to assess whether a mother’s detention as such causes long-term damage. On the basis of children’s interests, this article defends the principle that mothers who are actively involved in raising their children should not receive a prison sentence but an alternative punishment, unless continuing care is detrimental to the children or if the legal order or interests of society and its citizens would be disproportionally threatened. The article ends with several practical implications.

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.

In the Netherlands, a person sentenced to life imprisonment (lifer) cannot be pardoned or paroled. This has led to debate. I have investigated if this impossibility also exists in other countries (Canada, England, Germany, Belgium). This article shows that in all the other countries studied, lifers can be pardoned after a certain period of time. A law comparative interpretation of article 3 ECHR would therefore lead to the conclusion that the current Dutch policy is contradictory to this article. The results in this article could contribute to the debate that has arisen in the Netherlands.

Signs that a more or less substantial group of people in Dutch prison experience problems as a result of an intellectual disability, suggest that it makes sense to track this group and subsequently offer them the support they need. The reason this does not happen in practice is a lack of knowledge on various fronts. As it is, it is not clear how large the group of people with an intellectual disability in Dutch prisons is, what problems they face, and what could aid them. This article highlights what we do know and what we do not know with regards to this group.

To reduce recidivism of former prisoners, the Ministry of Security and Justice aims at improving the reintegration of former prisoners into free society. The objective is to ensure that former prisoners have, among other things, an income and accommodation at the time they are released from prison. The article studies the changes in the extent that prisoners have an income and accommodation during imprisonment. Results show that before imprisonment 83% of the prisoners have some form of accommodation, 76,2% have a legal income and 70,2% have debts. During imprisonment 28,8% of the prisoners lose their income, and 5,5% of the prisoners lose their accommodation.

How can the social environment of a prison be accurately assessed? Why is it important to measure? How should the prison experience be represented in empirical research? How do we capture distinctions between prisons, which can be good or bad in so many different ways? There is considerable consensus about the inadequacy of narrow and selective performance measures, such as hours spent in purposeful activity or serious assaults, in representing prison quality. The difficulties are both methodological and conceptual. This paper will outline one attempt to address these questions in England and Wales. Based on a series of studies aimed at identifying and measuring aspects of prison life that ‘matter most’, prisoners describe stark differences in the moral and emotional climates of prisons serving apparently similar functions. The ‘differences that matter’ are in the domain of interpersonal relationships and treatment. A developmental programme of empirical research on the quality of life in prison suggests that (a) some prisons are more survivable than others and (b) important differences in identifiable aspects of prison quality exist and may be related to outcomes. These findings have implications for our understanding of the meaning of terms like ‘inhuman and degrading’ treatment as well as for our uses and expectations of the prison.