Belgium is struggling to reintegrate its prisoners. A lack of resources, poor support and social stigmatisation are making a challenging task even harder. The recidivism rate was 57.6 percent in 2015, meaning the prison system is struggling to fulfil its mission of rehabilitation. The situation is having a negative impact on inmates, leaving them in a cycle of exclusion and precarity.
In August 2024, the young Cape Verdean-Belgian singer Jonas Gomes agreed to perform at Saint-Gilles prison in Brussels. He left Belgium’s second-oldest prison deeply shaken. A few months later, in a social-media post that went viral, he described the dilapidated state of the building and the difficult living conditions within: the cracked walls, the oppressive atmosphere, the palpable despair of the inmates. “Saint-Gilles prison is a house of death”, he wrote, before calling on Belgian politicians to take action.
While singling out Belgium’s dreadful prison conditions, Gomes also pointed to the purported ambition of the prison system to rehabilitate prisoners. “Plunging a person into this hell and thinking he’ll have the mental health to get back on the straight and narrow is bottomless stupidity,” he said.
Gomes’s appeal highlights a truth too often ignored in public debate and policy: prisons are not just where people are deprived of their freedom, they are also places where rehabilitation should be a priority. Yet people who have experienced incarceration often struggle to break away from criminality.
A blocked system
In Belgium, prisoner reintegration remains an unsolved problem. It has been hard to find concrete, effective and sustainable solutions, and obstacles litter the path towards progress. The most important of these is overcrowding: according to the 2023 Central Prison Supervision Council (CCSP) report, peak occupancy in Belgian prisons stood at 11,988 inmates for 10,600 places in December 2023 – an occupancy rate of 113 percent. To this can be added a lack of resources, inadequate support systems and a glaring lack of coordination between the concerned parties.
The Belgian penitentiary system was originally designed for a dual mission of punishment and rehabilitation. However, the imperative to reintegrate prisoners now stands at an impasse. Detainees, who often come from unprivileged backgrounds, rarely emerge from prison properly prepared to rejoin society. On the contrary, many of them, finding no alternatives and no support, relapse into crime. A cycle of exclusion and reoffending takes hold.
Karim (not his real name), who is 27, typifies this phenomenon. Born in a poor neighborhood, he grew up in an unstable home and dropped out of school in his teens. By the age of 16, he was involved in illegal activities and lacked any career prospects. A violent altercation and a stabbing charge landed him in prison for four months. For Karim this period of incarceration could have been a chance for rehabilitation, allowing him to get his life back on track. However, the reality of prison was much harsher than he had imagined. “In prison, they punish you, but they don’t give you any way out,” he says. “The days are long and empty. There’s no proper training, no support. Just you, your mistake, and the walls that send you back to your past.”
Upon release, Karim discovered that the obstacles to reintegration were even more numerous than he had imagined. Employers are reluctant to give someone with a criminal record a chance. The administrative procedures to obtain social assistance or housing take weeks, sometimes months. “So I went back to what I knew: illegal activity”, he recounts. Karim is not the only one to have experienced this backsliding. The lack of training, support and social guidance during prison life has the effect of marginalizing prisoners before they even leave prison. Their exclusion is only worsened once they are released.
Behind the statistics, individuals left high and dry
Given such problems, the challenge of reintegration can seem almost unattainable. According to figures from the Concertation des Associations Actives en prison (CAAP), 75 percent of Belgian prisoners have a low level of education, 30 percent are illiterate, and 45 percent have only completed primary school. Behind such statistics the usual story is one of failure at school, family dysfunction and generally a chronic lack of support. “Even before they come into conflict with the law, these individuals are already accumulating social and economic handicaps, such as low levels of education or financial insecurity,” explains Victor Perlihou, a criminologist working with ASBL APRÈS, an organization that supports prisoners and ex-prisoners in their rehabilitation. “Their delinquent behavior stems directly from this context: a feeling of abandonment, a desperate need for recognition and a quest for survival in an environment where opportunities are almost non-existent.”
The prison system only exacerbates these issues. Some prisons do offer training programs, but these remain rare and are often poorly adapted. In 2022, only 6 percent of Belgian inmates were taking part in skills training. The figure shows the scale of the system’s failure to prepare prisoners to rejoin society. The requirements for accessing training courses are often prohibitive. Inmates may be required to master one of the national languages, have basic mathematical skills, or adhere to timetables that are incompatible with their incarceration. Allowance must be made for the time they already spend in paid prison jobs. Although low-paying, such jobs enable some inmates to cover their legal or support costs. Inmates may therefore prefer this option over training courses with onerous access conditions.
The lack of support is compounded by a general lack of resources. Overcrowding, a recurring problem in Belgian prisons, limits the scope for individualised supervision. Belgium faces a persistent prison-overcrowding problem, with an average occupancy rate of 124 percent in 2023, according to the International Prison Observatory (OIP). A 2002 law calls for a personalized detention plan to be drawn up for each prisoner, including an educational or vocational pathway. It is rarely applied. Prison staffing is inadequate, and social workers and educators, overloaded with administrative duties, are unable to provide decent support. The ratio of staff to inmates is one of the lowest in Europe, with an average of only one member of staff for every 40 inmates. Budgets allocated to rehabilitation remain just as inadequate, representing barely 5 percent of overall prison spending.
“After their release, prisoners face extreme hardship”, says Perlihou, the criminologist. “Financial aid, when it is available, often takes several weeks or even months to arrive.” In the meantime, prisoners have to find accommodation, meet their immediate needs and pay off debts, all without any stable income. “The breakdown of family ties, exacerbated by long sentences, further complicates their social reintegration,” he adds.
The nonprofit organisation APRÈS, which has been active in Brussels for thirty years, is working to break this vicious circle. Subsidised by the Brussels employment agency Actiris, APRÉS works inside the Saint-Gilles and Haren prisons (north-east of Brussels). Its multidisciplinary teams of criminologists and psychologists provide personalised support. However, the ASBL’s financial resources are limited, and waiting lists for its services can be several weeks or even months long, which hurts their effectiveness. Funding quotas and budget restrictions further limit the margin for manoeuvre, putting the assistance even further out of reach for many prisoners.
Time itself also complicates reintegration. Legal calendars, administrative deadlines and training-programme timetables can often clash with the real-world needs of detainees. Often, a prisoner will not be able even to start a training course due to the length of his sentence. Inmates who benefit from a lightened sentence are often overwhelmed by obligations that need to be respected, such as appointments with their counsellor. The effect is to prevent them from focusing on reintegration.
A successful reintegration involves a number of different parties: legal institutions (magistrates, court assistants), social bodies (social services, reintegration organisations), training centres, as well as private companies willing to recruit ex-prisoners. A lack of coordination between these entities, plus poor incentives, has tended to render their actions ineffective.
Successful reintegration benefits not only ex-prisoners but also society as a whole. Giving more attention to the issue could help to reduce the rate of recidivism. According to the INCC (National Institute of Criminalistics and Criminology), the recidivism rate for all offences was 57.6 percent in 2015. Reducing the number of people in prison would also cut the costs associated with incarceration, which weigh heavily on public finances. According to 2022 figures from the justice ministry, a prisoner costs an average of €55,624.24 per year. Each year, more than half a billion euros goes into the budget allocated to Belgium’s prisons.
For all these reasons it is essential to consider rehabilitation not as a favour, but as a collective responsibility. It is the key to a more inclusive and just future for all members of Belgian society.
Translated by Ciaran Lawless, edited by Harry Bowden | Voxeurop
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