Earlier this year, before he became the UK prisons minister, James Timpson described how Britain should follow the Dutch example of mild sentencing to help solve the prisons crisis.
“They have shut half their prisons not because people are less naughty in Holland,” he told Channel 4. “It’s because they have a different way of sentencing, which is community sentencing so people can stay at home, keep their jobs, keep their homes, keep reading their children bedtime stories, and it means they are far less likely to commit crime again. A custodial sentence is not always the right thing.”
But in the Netherlands, those comments evoked surprise in some quarters, underlining that there are no easy solutions.
The country has experienced an escalation in drug-related crime and has a new rightwing government keen to be seen as hard on law and order.
Overall crime dropped in the past decade but figures such as the Rotterdam mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb, are sounding the alarm about a wave of violent, drug-related criminality.
A lawyer, journalist and the brother of a crown witness were murdered in connection with a six-year gangland trial. Justice ministers have talked about a breakdown in law and order and announced a clampdown on “narcoterrorism” and higher sentences.
This year there have been reports and parliamentary questions on overcrowded prisons. The latest figures from the WODC, the justice ministry’s research and datacentre, show that the number of people being jailed trended downwards from 2014 to 2020 but has risen since then.
Amber van der Toorn, a spokesperson for the Rechtspraak judicial system, said any suggestion that the Dutch punish less was incorrect: “There is often an image that Dutch judges give low sentences and that we sit on the side of prevention, but if you look at international research, it is really not the case that we give less high prison sentences in the Netherlands.”
Sven Brinkhoff, a professor in criminal law at the University of Amsterdam, said the reality was more complex than Timpson thought.
“On the one hand, we see that the numbers of prison sentences are in fact rising again,” he said. “We also see a firm law and order ‘tone of voice’ from the Ministry of Justice, advocating higher sentences. On the other hand, we do see another movement … where there is more room for mediation, restorative justice and looking at other ways of punishment like community service.”
Other criminologists believe – alongside life sentences for drug-related murders – that judges favour non-custodial sentences for certain misdemeanours.
Jan van Dijk, an emeritus professor of criminology at Tilburg University, who has studied global crime patterns from 2006 to 2019, believes the rise in Dutch imprisonments was a blip in a long-term trend. “[Timpson] is completely right to say we punish less by incarceration: it was the case 40 years ago, then the prisoner rate grew a lot but in the last 20 years it plummeted to less than half of the British rate,” he said.
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“For many crimes where you get a prison sentence in Great Britain, in the Netherlands you get community service, and guidelines from the public prosecution give preference to this. The reason is that Dutch research has shown that people with a short prison sentence only get worse, so the recidivism rate is higher with a short prison sentence than with a community service order.”
The Dutch justice ministry stressed to the Guardian that judges, who rule on cases and give sentence, operate independently. “Our laws give the judges the possibility to give community sentences and conditional sentences, but they apply these sentences where they see fit,” said a spokesperson, Frerick Althof.
David Downes, a London School of Economics professor who compared the Dutch and British systems in a 1988 study, said the Dutch approach would still be a “better alternative”.
“The criminal drug market looms ever larger but that mainly reflects the importance of the Netherlands as an entrepot nation rather than the ‘soft touch’ in sentencing,” he said. “The philosophy of sentencing remains remarkably anti-penal despite growing moves to the extreme right politically. It is to be hoped that Dutch tolerance survives.”