Inmates’ rights in Belgium : a criminological approach

Today international and national standards promote more and more the use of non-custodial and alternative sanctions : imprisonment should be used to the least possible extent. However prison doesn’t constitute the ultimate remedy in Belgium and elsewhere. It’s therefore still necessary to take time to think about penitentiary phenomenon and notably about human rights protection of detainees, one of the most topical concerns of the last decade.

For a long time, the prisons system can be characterized by a paradox : prison is as the same time the instrument of criminal law and escapes to the hold of law. Nevertheless, the introduction of legal rules in prison is a primordial element : it’s difficult to conceive that ex-inmates adopt a respectful behaviour of social norms when they have been treated — all too frequently — for several years as lawless beings in a lawless world. However, inmates aren’t left to a complete arbitrary: most of Belgian jurisdictions (mainly the emergency interim proceedings) proved to be fervent defenders of fundamental inmates’ rights. That contrasted with the inertia from the State and a lack of satisfactory legal basis.

During the last years, the Belgian State has been reacting to this problem by instituting a Commission in charge of the redaction of a law of principles about penitentiary administration and legal status of inmate. Both crisis of legality and of legitimacy of custodial sanctions have made necessary the intervention of law in prison.

One of main concerns of the Commission has been to preserve inmate’ s nature of responsible and social being and to avoid that the separation “society-inmate” becomes more considerable. Defence of fundamental rights is an essential instrument in these purposes. The introduction of law in prison fits in with a perspective of preparation to reinsertion and this preparation requires that detention conditions differ as little as possible from living conditions in society. In this context, it appears interesting to analyse recent evolution of Belgian penitentiary policy, policy that tends towards an execution of sentences sure, human, constructive and turned towards the future.