Abstract
Prison leave decision-making remains largely unknown, operating as a black box in which applications enter and decisions come out, without knowing what happens in between. Prison leave decision-making in Belgium is no exception to this. After a prisoner submits an application for prison leave, the prison director has to provide a written opinion about it, which is then sent on to the Service for the Management of Imprisonment (SMI), which decides whether a prisoner should obtain prison leave. Five years after implementing the legislation, the Directorate General of Penitentiary Institutions mandated a national study of prison leave decision-making practices. The study showed that both key actors, prison directors and the SMI, used their own highly discretionary approach to decision-making. There was little transparency regarding the other actor’s approach, fuelling mutual misunderstanding and frustrations about the other actor’s decisions. Since then, attempts have been made to structure discretionary decision-making. In this article, we first outline the types of prison leave as they have come into existence since 2006. Next, key observations of the first national study are given, as they set the scene for what came afterwards. We then go on to reconstruct steps in an ongoing process of structuring discretionary decision-making. These have led to an increased proportion of prison leaves being granted, with more concordance in decision-making between prison directors and staff at the SMI. We conclude the article by linking the Belgian practice to wider debates about decision-making.
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Notes
Prison leave is also available for ‘interned’ offenders (who are not being punished for an offence, as they are deemed criminally irresponsible due to mental health problems) and for sentenced offenders who have left prison on electronic monitoring or in semi-detention.
Prior to the 2006 Release Act, some life sentence prisoners with poor prospects of early release (or no intention to get out of prison) were allowed prison leave on humanitarian grounds, using prison leave as a survival strategy, to get a feeling of outside society. The most notable example is that of the longest serving life sentence prisoner in Belgium, who made use of this about one hundred times before his right to prison leave was removed until he took efforts to apply for early release. Yet he feels it is safer for himself and for society for him to stay in prison until death. His case is exemplary for shifting priorities in rationales underlying prison leave.
In this regard, the Court of Cassation, the highest Belgian court, decided on 13 November 2013 that the 2006 release legislation confers a subjective right to prison leave in case all legal conditions are fulfilled (e.g. Beernaert 2014; Robert and Mine 2014b), confirming that prison leave is not a favour (see also further).
In 2016, the legislator introduced an exclusionary criterion for prison leave, i.e. not having a legal stay in the country, but on 21 December 2017, the Constitutional Court (which checks new legislation on its constitutionality and on its respect of basic human rights) ruled against this criterion, which was then dropped by the legislator. This ruling by the Constitutional Court confirms that in principle, no sentenced prisoners, including those without a right to remain in Belgium, are excluded from prison leave.
Prior to these elements, the grounds for applying for a certain type of prison leave must be checked. If the application is based on grounds that are not covered by the (legal) objectives for a short or extended prison leave, then the application can already be refused.
The principle of negative selection, introduced in Belgium’s prison system in 1981, explains why a list of counter-indications are mentioned. Since, prior to that time, all types of modalities were considered a favour, it was up to the prisoner to prove their worthiness to obtain this favour. Under that positive selection principle, the prisoners selected were those who seemed the most suitable for such a favour. The principle of negative selection reversed this, at least in theory. It is now up to the decision-maker (the SMI, the prison director, the SIC) to argue why a prisoner should not obtain a certain modality, hence the term counter-indications, indications against prison leave (e.g. Nederlandt and Slingeneyer 2016, pp. 169–171).
Interestingly, an explicit link between prison leave and classification practices is still lacking. No formal security-based classification of regimes or prisons exists (i.e. external classification) and no link is made between prison leave and serving time in a particular (type of) prison. This absence also applies to internal classification, meaning that it is perfectly possible to have prisoners with and others without prison leave living together on the same landing in a closed prison, with a range of challenges that ensue, e.g. prisoners being put under pressure to bring contraband in (e.g. Devresse et al. 2011).
In addition, the 2006 changes have not included instating an appeal procedure against negative decisions by the SMI. In addition to the usual decision-maker, exceptionally, the Sentence Implementation Court (SIC) can also grant prison leave (only for long-term prisoners). This is not an appeal procedure sensu stricto, but rather a second, subsidiary route towards prison leave, when prisoners’ application(s) repeatedly have been turned down by the SMI; prisoners turn to the SIC and apply for an early release modality and for exceptional granting of prison leave (s.59; e.g. Scheirs and De Turck 2014; Nederlandt and Slingeneyer 2016, p. 161).
These 2244 decisions by the SMI concerned 181 decisions about an extraordinary leave, 1164 decisions about a short leave, and 899 decisions related to an extended leave.
Such internal jurisprudence resonates with how ‘case decision-making is also a form of policy-making’, in which decisions are made ‘about how to decide particular classes of case’ (Hawkins 1986, p. 1171). No similar explicit jurisprudence existed in the French-speaking part of the SMI.
On top of this, in a very small number of applications, the SMI had to transfer the application to the Director General of the prison system or to the Minister’s Cabinet Office, which then took a final decision about prison leave. At the time of the NICC study, this occurred in only 26 out of 2244 applications (approx. 1%). Given the marginal number and highly specific nature of cases, we do not focus on these here (but see Mine and Robert 2013).
During the NICC study, only one decision out of 824 negative director’s advices differed and in this case, the prisoner had applied for both short leave and extended leave, obtaining a positive advice for extended leave and a negative advice for short leave.
Unfortunately, the French-speaking SMI staff and manager refused to talk with us when we contacted them for an informal talk at the end of 2018 and again early 2019. This also reflects how the NICC report was received at the Service for the Management of Imprisonment, with the Flemish part drawing on the report to look for improvements, while the French-speaking part seemed to take the report and its descriptive account as a hostile and negative account of their work, a misrepresentation at best. Regretfully, we were never invited to talk about their negative view of the report, even though, during the official discussion with the steering group, the French-speaking head was there and did not bring up this negative reception. In mail communication, upon asking for an informal discussion about what happened after the NICC study, we were informed that no real changes had occurred since early 2013. The information we received on the Flemish side completely contradicts that statement, as do the statistics.
The interpretation of these failure rates can only occur when the correct reference is known. It could be based on the prisoner (a prisoner might now occur several times in these numbers) or on the numbers of prison leave that took place across the entire population per a reference period. No one-on-one link with decisions about prison leave can be implied (e.g. extended leave, once granted, continues throughout the entire prison sentence, until a problem occurs).
By ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’, we refer to the empirical consequences: a ‘success’ or ‘failure’ upon prison leave according to pre-determined objectives and goals. This is not per se normatively preferable. The relation between empirical and normative correctness is beyond the scope of this article.
It is never possible to do away with both errors. As one researcher put it (applied to parole, but the argument can be extended to prison leave): ‘In the absence of complete predictive accuracy, the only way to completely eliminate the first type of error would be to parole no one; the only way to eliminate the second type of error would be to parole everyone’ (Hoffman 1974, p. 542).
In experiments that compare statistical or actuarial methods with case-based or clinical methods of decision-making, findings since the mid-1950s show a superiority of the actuarial method (since the classic study by Meehl 1954, confirmed by Dawes et al. 1989; Grove et al. 2000; Gottfredson & Moriarity 2006; and by Aegisdottir et al. 2007). In criminal justice risk assessment, a combination of the two approaches has been put forward as the preferable approach, drawing on the best aspects of both (Andrews and Bonta 2010, pp. 317–321).
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We want to explicitly thank staff at the Service for the Management of Imprisonment for their collaboration. We also want to extend our thanks to the current and former Director Generals of the Belgian Prison system who helped us in our quests.
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Robert, L., Mine, B., Maes, E. et al. Structuring Discretion Among Belgium’s Prison Leave Decision-makers. Eur J Crim Policy Res 26, 265–283 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-020-09444-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-020-09444-5