Description: While prison rates in the Netherlands have fallen dramatically since 2005, prison rates in Belgium show an impressive increase since the 1990s. According to the Penal Statistics of the Council of Europe, in 2020 Belgium detained almost twice as many prisoners per 100.000 inhabitants as the Netherlands (Aebi & Tiago, 2020)). Understanding prison rate trends is an important topic in penology. These statistics reflect on crime rates, punitiveness, social climate and the functioning of the criminal justice system (Pfaff 2008). Boone, Pakes & Van Wingerden (2020) distinguish four possible explanations for changing prison rates. They assume that they are either caused by 1) changes in the number or/and nature of committed crimes; 2) changes in the handling of cases in the various stages of the criminal justice process; 3) changes in sentencing practices; or 4) changes at the backdoor policy of the prison, such as possibilities to substitute the execution of prison sentences in electronic monitoring or to recall released prisoners back to prison. They conclude that the explanations are interrelated and cannot easily be disentangled, highlighting that research on prison populations requires careful examination of the whole criminal justice process. They also argue that in order to understand trends in prison rates more in-depth, comparative studies on the composition of prison populations add an important dimension. The proposed study aims to be the first step in such an approach. A combination of data collection and analyses, case studies and vignette-based interviews will be used.
Promotors: Miranda Boone (Universiteit Leiden), Sigrid van Winderden (Universiteit Leiden), Kristel Beyens (VUB)
Researchers: Olivier Nuyts, Hester De Boer (Universiteit Leiden)
Funding: Dutch Research Council (NWO)
Duration: 2021-2025