Prison overcrowding ‘suits everyone’

Vincent Spronck, the director of Brussels’ Forest prison, sarcastically extolled the virtues of prison overcrowding during a conference on the subject, reports La Libre Belgique. “Overcrowding allows the system to operate according to its own logic, without being swayed by any leftist logic,” he said, adding that “it suits everyone”. According to Spronck, overcrowding is “a beautiful loincloth which allows us not to address the real causes of the failure of prisons”. He did, however, make constructive proposals to improve the functioning of the prison system, estimating that the non-execution of the last six months of a sentence would lower the number of prisoners.