Neighboring Belgium allowed prisoners to serve sentences remotely
Фото: Milad Fakurian, Unsplash
Belgium's prisons are overcrowded. Instead of the maximum of 10,700 people, more than 12,000 are being held. This makes prison conditions extremely difficult for many.
However, the problem is not only the prisoners themselves, although their rights are defended at the state level. A more serious problem is staff fatigue. Overcrowding in prisons provokes conflicts and clashes that have to be resolved by the administration and the guards. As a result, Belgian trade unions warn of the possibility of strikes, which have already become quite frequent.
In order to prevent the situation from getting worse, the government has taken a rather risky and original step. It is offering prisoners a kind of "vacation" - a time when a convict can serve his sentence at home instead of in a cell. The initiative proposes to alternate one month in prison with one month of (conditional) freedom.
Similar experiments have already taken place during the pandemic. Of course, those who are in prison for particularly serious crimes, for sexual crimes, for terrorism, or if the sentence exceeds 10 years, will not be affected. But those sentenced to a few years for theft, for example, may well get some relief.
