Forms of violence and regimes in prison

This empirical study of violence in prisons in Belgium was commissioned by the Director-General of the Prison Administration due to fears that liberalisation of prison regimes was increasing the level of prisoner-on-prisoner violence, including rumours from some Belgian prison directors that certain prisoners no longer dared to participate in communal activities. In its report to the Belgian government following its second visit to Belgium in 1997, the Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) also referred to inter-prisoner violence and resulting feelings of insecurity by prisoners in one of the visited prisons. Coupled with the question about the level of violence in Belgian prisons was the policy-related question about the necessity or desirability of reintroducing the special security units, which had known a turbulent history in Belgium and were closed in 1996 following judicial action ( Snacken, 2001: 71; infra 5.7). The research was carried out by five researchers and two supervisors of the criminology departments of the two Free Universities of Brussels VUB (Flemish) and ULB (French) over a two-year period (1999–2000) (see Snacken et al 2000). ¹