1

The Danish Prison and Probation Service

Open prisons

Kim AndersenVIII Conference on Physical Activity and Sports in Prisons (Compartim Knowledge Manadgment Programme of Department of Justice in Catalonia)

Barcelona, October, 16th, 2014

Disclaimer

The Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeWorks licence 3.0 permits reproduction, distribution and public communication of the material, as long as the authorship of the material and the CEJFE (Catalan Ministry of Justice) are credited and no commercial use is made of it, nor is it transformed to generate derived works (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc- nd/3.0/deed.ca)

THE TOPICS

• The Danish Prison and Probation Service in general

• Open prisons in Denmark

• Tendencies and the future

• Questions

MISSIONS AND TASKS

The mission of the Prison and Probation Service is to contribute to reducing criminality

Fundamental value and Strategy

The Art of Balancing a Strict and Soft Approach

The Programme of Principles

1. Normalisation

2. Openness

3. Responsibility

4. Security

5. Least possible intervention

6. Optimum use of resources

The Danish Prison and Probation Service

Multi-year agreements

Ministry of Justice

• The Danish Prison and Probation Service is subject to political multi-year agreements running for 4-5 years.

• The current multi-year agreement is valid for 2013-2016.

OrganizationMinister of

Justice

Ministry of Justice

Department of Prisons and probation

Director general

Training CenterProbation ServiceProbation OfficesHalf-way houses

Local prisonsPretrial

detention

Prisons

The director general doesn’t follow the governments reign and is in that sense independent of the politicians in power.

The Department and the institutions

• The Department of Prisons and Probation

• The Staff Training Centre of The Danish Prison an Probation Service

• Prisons

• Local prisons and local prison units

• Asylum-seekers institution – Ellebæk institution

• The Probation Service

• The 6 halfway houses

The new organization 2014Ministry of

justice

Region 1 Region 2 Region 3 Region 4

CEO

Management secretariat

Management serviceStrategy & controlling

Statistic & documentationcommunication

Law

Case handling/enforcement

Center

HR & RessourceCenter

ITCenter

Service

Service

Service

Prisons Local prisons

Probation institutions

Region 1

Financial ressources

The total 2013 budget amounted 403 m. euro

Price per inmate per day:

• Maximum secured prisons• Minimum secured prisons• Local prisons• Halfway houses

239 euro156 euro154 euro162 euro

Staff

• Around 4,700 staff members (full-time) work within the service.

• 2/3 are uniformed staff and 1/3 civilian staff.

• 55% of staff member are men and 45% are women.

Difference in education and the content of work.

Key figures – Inmates/clientsState and local prisons

Prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants:Total number of places in state and local prisons:Capacity utilisation, management target:Prisoners per day serving sentences:Remand prisoners per day:Female prisoners per day:Detained asylum-seekers per day:Young offenders under the age of 18 per day (2012):Inmates with an ethnic background other than Danish:Admissions per year:

714.16098 %2,4721.362

15811512

37%14.000

Probation Service (offices and half-way houses)

Residents of half-way houses per day:Clients per day subject to electronic tagging:Clients on December 31th under supervision:Pre-sentence reports per year:Community service orders per year:

166293

9.57311.8396.689

CAT-2013

13310.000

1.667766

45 %

During incarnationOccupation (work/education/treatment)

Leisure time

Contact with family

Self-catering

Leaves

Escapes

Release on parole

Alternative to custodial punishment

Community service

•The hours of work required are between 30-300.

•The work must be carried out during leisure time.

Electronic tagging

•Offenders with a sentence to up to 6 months can apply.

Serving a sentence at a treatment institution

Efforts and results

Recidivism – the total rate isRecidivism rate for offenders having served a prison sentence isRecidivism rate for offenders having served a community order isRecidivism rate for offenders having served under home curfew detention is

28 %38 %20 %18 %

Treatment and programmes• Individual action and sentence plans.• Treatment guarantee.• 50 treatment programs – e.g. drug abuse, prevention of

violence, sexological treatment, improvement of cognitive skills.

• Good release scheme.

RecidivismCAT40 %

Open prisons

• In Denmark there is 9 open prisons in 2014.

• The first open prison started in 1933.

• The new prison concept “open prison” arose from the need of placing citizens that betrayed the country during the 2. world war.

• Forerunners for “the open prison concept” was the youth- prisons, especially “Søbysøgård” and “Sønder Omme”.

• The imprisonment and daily life in these youth-prisons had a more open minded approach to serving time and had less fixed forms and can move around freely compared to the closed prisons.

More humane imprisonment

Same rights as the inmates in maximum security prisons – for instance the inmates are obliged to work 37 hours a week.

The open prison Søbysøgård

Focal points in open prisons

• Focus on local outdoor resource exploitation – agriculture and forestry.

• Focus on education.

• More inmates are allowed to work outside the prison in the community than prisoners in closed prisons.

• A larger portion of the inmates start their exit plans sooner and get probation.

The inmates in open prisons

• More inmates have shorter sentences.

• The open prisons are a part of the exit plan for the inmates that serve time in the maximum security prisons.

• Men and women serve together.

The daily life in open prisons

Opportunities – uses the local community to

integrate the inmates into society – the inmates...

• Can move around freely

• Go shopping

• Go to the library

• Do workout

• Focus on health issues

Open prison vs. closed prison

The open prison is...

• More humane

• The ability to move around freely

• Mobile phones are allowed

• Early exit plan and probation

• No walls

The Danish Prison and Probation Service in the future

Moving towards a centralisation and 4 regional Centres.

The focal points are:

• Partnerships – cooperation across the 4 centres as an ongoing process of development e.g. better workflow in case handling.

• Focus on the client.

• Standardization of work tasks.

The Danish Prison and Probation Service in the future

• A significant decline in youth crime and also a tendency of shorter sentences for the youngsters committing crime.

• Women prison.

• Political restriction.

• Greater focus on gang related crime and inmates that are gang related.

QUESTIONS