ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the narratives and practices of community punishment in Belgium at different levels, that is, policy and legislation, application and operation. It focuses on work penalty and electronic monitoring (EM) to tell the Belgian story of community punishment. The emergence of the work penalty and EM is situated in a broader political context and their acceptance is compared with earlier community oriented penal interventions, such as probation and suspended sentences. The chapter argues that the development of the new generation of community penalties is deeply rooted in the problem of the ever-increasing prison overcrowding and the search for a solution to the prison crisis. An important feature of current community penalties is that other, non-penal actors get a role in the execution of the sentence. The chapter shows how initial rehabilitative narratives and practices of the work penalty and EM have been reframed under the pressures of increasing numbers, managerial objectives and budgetary considerations.
