Punishment

Abstract

About 2,000,000 punishable acts come to the attention of the Dutch police every year. They include some 170,000 felonies. Approximately 40,000 of these are brought before the court. The Dutch courts sentence some 15,000¹ persons a year to short and long prison sentences. About 5,000 of them have been in prison before (recidivism), and some 7,000 are sent to prison for the first time. About 150 offenders are committed to institutions each year for compulsory treatment. Of the 3,000 inmates who populate the Dutch prisons, some 1,600 (more than half!) are being held in pre-trial detention.

‘There is yet another way to exercise power: through service... This form of using power has no glamor, no majesty; it is simply businesslike.’

Romano Guardini on accepting the Erasmus Prize in 1962

‘No more self-defeating device could be discovered than the one society has developed in dealing with the criminal. It proclaims his career in such loud and dramatic forms that both he and the community accept the judgment as a fixed description.’

Frank Tannenbaum, ‘Crime in the Community’, 1938

‘In the courtroom I am a symbol more than a man.’

A judge

On the shyness of power: ‘... girls winked at and bashfully fingering the barrel of their tommy guns.’

Harry Mulish, ‘Het Woord bij de Daad’

‘As criminal law, the law cuts into its own flesh’.

G. A. Van Hamel