Belgian Prisons Buckle: Three in a Nine-Square-Metre Cell

Belgian prisons are holding three detainees in cells of just nine square metres, as chronic overcrowding pushes the country’s detention system toward breaking point. According to RTBF, 599 detainees were sleeping on mattresses on the floor in late September, while the country’s 43 prisons housed 13,434 people for just 10,795 available places — a shortfall of more than 2,600.

The figure has become the sharpest symbol of a crisis that has deepened for three decades, triggering prison-director resignations, repeated strikes by prison staff, and a formal warning from the Council of Europe over the treatment of detainees.

A system that has never kept pace

The overcrowding is not new. Detainee numbers have climbed from 8,156 in 1997 to 13,501 in 2026, and the prison population has exceeded available capacity every year in between, RTBF reported in its investigation into 30 years of prison data. The gap between population and capacity has widened from 844 in 2021 to 2,205 today, according to Valérie Callebaut, spokesperson for the FPS Justice.

Crucially, the rise in detainees has not tracked any rise in crime. “We went from 8,500 to 13,000 detainees in 30 years, without any rise in criminality,” an expert told RTBF’s #Investigation. “That means something is going on.” Research cited by the public broadcaster shows that overall delinquency has been declining since 1990, even as incarceration has soared.

Successive policies have offered only temporary relief. Belgium rented prison places in Tilburg, the Netherlands, between 2010 and 2016 without meaningfully reducing overcrowding. The 2022 opening of the Haren mega-prison, built for about 1,200 detainees, filled so quickly that Saint-Gilles prison never closed as planned. As the academic literature on the subject explains, new prison capacity tends to generate an “appel d’air” — allowing more sentences to be executed, absorbing the additional places.

Strikes, resignations and a European warning

The strain has spilled into open conflict. A 24-hour national strike brought prisons to a halt on 25 September, with unions reporting 599 detainees on the floor — “125 more than two weeks ago,” said Alain Blancke of the ACV union, as VRT reported. Unions also decried staff shortages, ageing infrastructure and uncertainty over planned pay rises. Jurgen Van Poecke, director of Haren prison, resigned in May 2026 citing overcrowding and staffing shortfalls, warning that the system was “institutionalising overcrowding.”

In September, the Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee published a damning report following visits to five prisons and two forensic psychiatry centres in May 2025. As RTBF detailed, the committee reported allegations of ill-treatment — slaps, punches and kicks by staff, often in areas not covered by CCTV — along with detainees having less than four square metres of personal space, delayed access to medical and mental-health care, and violence between detainees in almost every facility visited. Prison occupancy stood at 118 per cent at the time of the visits.

The report was particularly severe on the treatment of “internees” — people ruled not criminally responsible because of mental disorders, who are held in prison for lack of space in forensic psychiatry centres. At Ghent and Turnhout prisons, internees accounted for 40 per cent and 38 per cent of the population respectively, according to the RTBF report. The committee described their conditions as “disastrous,” with some left in cells soiled with faeces and urine, and staff lacking basic training to care for them.

Internees and the limits of building more

For critics, the treatment of internees exposes a deeper flaw: incarceration is being used as a default response to problems it was never designed to solve. Valérie Lebrun, director of Namur prison, has argued that building more places alone will not fix the system, pointing to the overuse of pre-trial detention and the lack of alternatives for addiction and mental-health cases.

Pre-trial detainees accounted for 32 per cent of the prison population in 2024, and roughly 40 per cent of detainees are foreign nationals. Christophe Mincke, director of the criminology department at the National Institute of Criminalistics and Criminology, has called for an objective reckoning. “Look reality in the face, whether we like it or not, then set objectives,” he told RTBF.

Lucie de Cock, co-president of the Observatoire international des prisons, put the case more bluntly: “We have never incarcerated so many people in Belgium,” she said, calling for “carceral disinflation” and the decriminalisation of offences such as drug use, which she argues should be handled as a public-health matter.

What the government is doing

In March 2026, the coalition government of Prime Minister Bart De Wever reached an agreement on anti-overcrowding measures after a standoff between Justice Minister Annelies Verlinden (CD&V) and Deputy Prime Minister David Clarinval (MR), who had demanded the deployment of soldiers in the streets in exchange for his support. The Council of Ministers approved the implementing bill on 22 May, as RTBF reported.

The measures include carrying out certain sentences of up to 18 months under electronic surveillance instead of in prison, provisionally until the end of 2028; earlier removal of detainees without residence permits; and early release six months before the end of sentences, limited to terms of no more than three years and extended only until the end of 2027. Verlinden and the unions had pushed for early release extended to 12 months, but coalition partners blocked the idea. Weaker versions of some of these measures had already produced only temporary dips. In January 2026, Belgium had a maximum capacity of 11,296 places against 13,479 detainees — a surplus of 2,183, with 4,127 people without papers and 1,082 internees among them, according to figures reported by La Libre.

A problem that no longer stops at the border

The consequences are now visible abroad. In March 2026, a court in Amsterdam refused to hand over a suspect to Belgium, citing the indignity of conditions at Malines prison — referencing structural overcrowding, detainees sleeping on the floor and the absence of separate sanitary facilities, as DHnet reported. Belgium has been repeatedly condemned by the European Court of Human Rights and by Belgian courts over detention conditions.

Government figures have floated renting prison capacity abroad — in Albania, Kosovo or Estonia — or mooring a floating prison in a Belgian port. Both ideas recall the inconclusive Tilburg experiment, and the Observatoire international des prisons has questioned whether such arrangements would solve a structural problem.

What to watch

The immediate question is whether the new measures will bend the curve durably or produce another temporary dip before numbers climb again. Mincke has argued for a longer horizon, proposing to bring the prison population down to around 6,000 over 15 to 20 years — a target he says is achievable and would free up resources for prevention. Whether Belgium’s political class is prepared to “change its software,” as he puts it, and to confront the uncomfortable question raised by the RTBF investigation — whether so many people need to be behind bars at all — remains open. For now, the country’s 9-square-metre cells, and the 599 people sleeping on the floor, mark the distance between ambition and reality.