Work on Self and Restorative Detention: Some Accounts of a Belgian Prison Policy
Beside population overcrowding, prison staff’s strikes, prisoners’suicides or escapes which are frequently reported by the press, prison might also be a place for rare innovative projects. Among those, an ambitious penitentiary policy, initiated in Belgium in 2000, aimed at re-shaping the culture of detention towards a culture of “restorative justice”. What can be said, today, of this attempt at introducing the concepts of victim, restoration, responsibilisation, sensitizing and conscientisation within prison walls ? The present contribution proposes a descriptive and illustrative account of this penitentiary policy, through two concrete situations arising from this policy. But rather than restoring the broken victim-offender relationship, the implementation of this policy has something to do with the work on detainees’self, the production of their reflexivity through their involvement in participatory devices and processes.