Introduction: The Respect of Human Rights of Prisoners in Europe

Abstract

One might ask: Why devote a special issue to prisoners’ rights in European prisons? In fact, there are good reasons that justify this choice. First and importantly, as a member of an independent organisation in my own country, which supervises penal institutions both for adults and minors and makes recommendations to the Minister of Justice concerning the respect of human rights in prisons and their treatment according to the law, I have assisted to an ever-increasing prison population in my country, the Netherlands. Now, the increase of the prison population is by far not exclusively a Dutch phenomenon, although the increase in the Netherlands since the 1990s is one of the fastest in Europe. We see this happening in the whole Western world (with the United States as an absolute topper: 724 prisoners per 100,000 in 2004). This trend is also apparent in most European countries, although there are substantial differences among countries, as is shown in Table I. In nearly all these selected countries, the prison population has increased. However, in some states the increase is considerable, such as in the UK and the Netherlands as well as in Spain and Poland, while in others, such as Italy and Sweden, the increase is relatively moderate. Moreover, it is important to underline that some countries show hardly or no increase, such as France, Austria and Finland. Second, the recent economic recession, reaching most European states, has led in the last years to sometimes considerable cuts in the budgets allocated to the prison system, one consequence of which is the paradoxical situation that ever-smaller budgets are available for an ever-growing prison population. All this is reflected in sometimes severe problems of overcrowding in many European prisons, often accompanied by a reduction of personnel, a serious restriction of the programme of activities in prison and more time spent in the generally cramped cells. Eur J Crim Policy Res (2006) 12:79–83 DOI 10.1007/s10610-006-9018-z