The US, China, Turkey and Brazil are just some of the countries that are putting more and more people behind bars. But in the Netherlands, it's a different story. Some empty prisons there have now been re-purposed as hotels or cultural centers.
[...]
A study conducted by the Universities of Leiden (Netherlands) and Portsmouth (UK)
found that the number of people in prison in the Netherlands fell from 94 per 100,000 citizens to 51 per 100,000 between 2005 and 2016.
Although the downward trend has not continued since, figures from Eurostat
suggest that the imprisonment rate has stabilized at this low level. In 2021 and 2022 it was at 54 per 100,000.
That makes the Netherlands one of the few countries that have seen their prison populations decline. Data platform World Prison Brief (WPB) has identified a similar trend in Germany, Liechtenstein, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania, and the Baltic states.
[...]
The number of people receiving custodial sentences from the courts has fallen significantly in the Netherlands. In 2005, Dutch courts imposed prison sentences on some 8,305 convicted criminals. Ten years later, only 4,540 offenders were sent to jail. Studies show that the decrease in custodial sentences was seen across the full spectrum of criminal activities.
Crimes against property saw a 44% decrease in prison sentences, violent crime and sexual crime saw imprisonment rates fall by 39%, and for drug-related crimes the drop was as much as 49%. The number of people sent to jail for failing to pay a court-imposed fine decreased by 38%.
The Netherlands also has an unusually low average length of custodial sentence. The criminologists at the University of Leiden noted in their study that half of all those sent to prison there were released again within one month.
By contrast, according to a report by the University of Lausanne that looked at prisoner rates across the 46 members of the Council of Europe, just 5.2% of inmates spend less than six months in jail, and some 21.3% serve between 12 months and three years.
[...]
Another major factor in the Netherlands is the fall in the number people being held in pre-trial detention. The study shows that 21,029 spent time on remand in Dutch prisons in 2005, with that number falling to 13,350 by 2016 โ a decrease of 37%.
In the same period โ 2005 to 2016 โ the number of crimes registered in the Netherlands fell from 1.35 million to 930,000. Crimes against property fell by 216,000 (-27%) and there were 32,000 fewer violent crimes (-26%).