That’s happening in our prisons too few staff are working is not correct according to Simon Deryckere. “Here you have approximately 1 penitentiary officer per inmate, which is 65,000 euros per year per inmate. That is much more than in our neighboring countries. I understand that this is not a nice message for the unions.”
What is true, according to him, is that prison guards do a lot of things worse conditions to work. Just think of the many internees and the often very outdated buildings.
Deryckere is not immediately in favor of more prisons – apparently the number of detainees increases when there are more places in prison – but does believe that new construction is urgently needed: new prisons to replace completely outdated institutions.
But the big problem in our prisons is aggression. “You also have that aggression when there is no overpopulation,” says Simon Deryckere. “You could do something about that by doing something smoking ban in the cells to introduce: half of the number of incidents has something to do with smoking, for example detainees stealing tobacco or cigarettes from each other.” Deryckere is convinced that such a smoking ban will reduce aggression in the long term.
