Public vs. Nonprofit Incarceration: The Case of the Netherlands

Abstract

Outsourcing of detention is a complex public task, due to quality risks from incomplete contracts, the public responsibility for sentencing and execution, and related social opinions. In the Netherlands, the debate about the outsourcing of prison services to the private profit sector has recently restarted. At the same time, in the Netherlands there is extensive experience of outsourcing prison services -in particular for juvenile detention and internal forensic psychiatric care -to nonprofit organizations. In the Dutch experience, we have not found differences between public and nonprofit execution, with respect to the type of contract with the prisons, costs and quality. The Dutch experience shows that outsourcing to nonprofit entrepreneurs in civil society can be an alternative to outsourcing to the private market.

The Criminal Justice Voluntary Sector: Concepts and an Agenda for an Emerging Field

“…Our tripartite categorisation seeks to encourage nuanced, cross‐cutting analyses of different forms of voluntary action. It is relevant beyond England and Wales, given awareness that: (i) criminal justice, welfare and voluntary sector policies, cultures, operating assumptions and practices differ across territories and time (Tomczak ); (ii) criminal justice restructuring is not globally homogeneous, for example, the Netherlands has a tradition of core statutory services being delegated to voluntary and private sector agencies, particularly in juvenile detention and probation, where some tasks are carried out by Salvation Army Probation (Wassenaar, Gradus and Molleman ). Our examples have footnotes indicating relevance in other jurisdictions (unfortunately limited to Anglophone literature).…”