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While the UK and much of the world struggles with overcrowded prisons, the Netherlands has the opposite problem. It is actually short of people to lock up. In the past few years 19 prisons have closed down and more are slated for closure next year. How has this happened - and why do some people think it's a problem?
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"In the Dutch service we look at the individual," says Van der Spoel."If somebody has a drug problem we treat their addiction, if they are aggressive we provide anger management, if they have got money problems we give them debt counselling. So we try to remove whatever it was that caused the crime. The inmate himself or herself must be willing to change but our method has been very effective. Over the last 10 years, our work has improved more and more."
He adds that some persistent offenders - known in the trade as "revolving-door criminals" - are eventually given two-year sentences and tailor-made rehabilitation programmes. Fewer than 10% then return to prison after their release. In England and Wales, and in the United States, roughly half of those serving short sentences reoffend within two years, and the figure is often higher for young adults.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 12 2016, @05:55AM
The cultural environment is massively different between, say, Utrecht and the south side of Chicago. Also, the character of the people as well.
I'm happy it's working for the dutch. Good for them. But trying to extrapolate existing results in a (surprisingly) disciplined culture in a small country with a (surprisingly) uniform population (no matter what some of them say - it's nowhere near as diverse by percentages as the US, although other countries are yet more diverse than the US, such as South Africa) to other environments is a flawed approach.
It's also not as if the USA doesn't have rehabilitation programmes. Halfway houses, probation plans, charities that work with rehabilitation, alternative treatment for addicts. These things exist; maybe not on as elaborate a scale, but they do exist. Their success rate just happens to be very spotty because in many cases the predominant culture of the offender's social environment will lead them to offend again; there is no fix for that other than somehow dumping these offenders in a completely different environment.
So yeah. It's a nice story, but not one that translates.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by bart on Sunday November 13 2016, @03:21PM
My mother in law used to work as a librarian in the Dutch prison system.
She says that whenever U.S. inmates entered the prison, they would always be very aggressive in the first few days, and then settle down and relax, realizing that no-one was going to rape or shoot them.
The animal in a cage attitude that pervades U.S. prisons turns people into aggressive animals. How strange!
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday November 14 2016, @04:19PM
In other words, we have a random mixture of largely unsanctioned and experimental programs, many of them designed in an attempt to dampen the overly harsh government response after the fact, which are largely ineffective because they aren't able to overcome the environment created by our own government which drives these people to reoffend.
It takes careful effort to fix a broken PC. It takes significantly more after you get frustrated and smash your boot through the screen. No charity can come up with a quick and easy fix for people who have already been through our prison system. "Dumping those offenders in a completely different environment" describes both the Dutch and the US prison systems, but in the US case, the environment into which we put them only serves to reinforce or create antisocial behavior.