Your report (UK could rent space in foreign jails to ease shortage of cells, 3 October) did not raise the question of why the Netherlands, or any country, should have prison space to spare. A whole empty prison in the Netherlands was able to be brought back into use for Norwegian prisoners, for example.
From 2005 to 2022, the numbers imprisoned in the Netherlands fell from 50,650 to 30,380. In the same period our prison population rose from 76,190 to 80,659. In the Netherlands, the reduction is partly because it doesn’t need the capacity. While prison is the answer in a number of situations, it is not the only way to punish offenders.
Authorities in the Netherlands have found that alternative methods work far better at cutting reoffending than short sentences. Methods such as curfews and taakstraf (requiring offenders to do specified work in their free time) are used often – perhaps backed up by a suspended sentence as “encouragement”. Offenders stand a better chance of keeping a job or studying, and the state is not paying to feed and house them.
