While politicians speak of ‘Code Zwart’ in the prison system because of a poignant shortage of cells, former prisons have been transformed into Fatbike workshops, apartments, hotels, classrooms and artists’ workshops in recent years.
That fact was a reason for Giel Bonte (24), a student at the KABK in The Hague, to take a photo series about former prisons in the Netherlands. Bonte visited eight former houses of custody in two months.
At first glance, those often fairly gray buildings, sometimes with iron bars for the windows, do not seem to be the most inspiring places to establish you as an artist. But Karen van Gelderen (53), who works in her studio every Friday afternoon in the former penitentiary institution De Kruisberg in Doetinchem, finds it ‘delicious’. In a partly pink painted cell, she mainly makes creations with epoxy here: “Despite the size of 2.5 meters by 3.5 meters, it is really my own place.”
The building itself does not make her happy, “it is not exactly a pearl,” but the people who live and work there do. After the closure of the Kruisberg as a prison and parenting establishment, the spaces for a relatively low price were temporarily rented out to prevent the building from being cracked. In the meantime, various companies and people have gathered here. Van Gelderen: “There are all kinds of companies now. IT companies, a yoga studio, other artists, a city farmer. Thanks to the layout of the building you often bump into each other. A really kind of community sense has arisen.”
The Kruisberg is one of the many prisons or penitentiary institutions that have been closed in recent years. The crisis years that followed on the economic malaise forced austerity in 2008, and the Rutte-II cabinet decided to partially dismantle the prison system. It already led to protests then. The then Member of Parliament Nine Kooiman (SP) predicted that “criminals would be put on the couch at home with an ankle strap through CrimeFighter Teeven”. Since 2012, 26 locations have been taking their doors and 2,600 jobs disappeared at the Judicial Institutions Agency (DJI).
Now, about twelve years later, is According to Wim Saris, director-general of the Judicial Institutions Agencythe occupancy rate of Dutch prisons 99.7 percent, he says in Fidelity. Last week the Scientific Research and Datacentrum (WODC) estimated that the lack of space will only become bigger without additional policy measures. The pressure on the prison system due to the cell deficiency would then increase by 1 percent per year.
Interesting history
“It’s a bit bitter,” says 68-year-old Bert Poortman, who has been providing tours at the former Wolvenplein prison in Utrecht for more than ten years. “On the one hand a shortage of cells, on the other hand prisons that get a different destination.”
Poortman was used about twelve years ago when it became known that the Utrecht location was closing, with a group of local residents to turn Wolvenplein into a building with office and workplaces and event rooms. According to De Utrechter, an empty building would soon lead to “a dead place in your neighborhood”. “We wanted to change a place where nobody wants to go, to a place where people out of curiosity want to look inside. Because of the incredibly interesting history, but also because of the activities and activity.”
That history is not nearly an advantage for anyone who lives or works in a former prison. Although Van Gelderen was not awake from the history of the Kruisberg as a detention location, she initially had more difficulty with the history of the building as a boy’s prison and parenting establishment. Certainly when one of the boys, who had been stuck in the building for a long time, came by: “It was an older man in a wheelchair, he visited this place together with his son. The man had been in the parenting foundation and had to cry. I thought that was very intense.”
Photographer Giel Bonte was also impressed by the history that the former prisons also carry: “In many of those buildings you still have insulation cells, which then sit in a basement somewhere afterwards. Now all those renovated complexes look very cozy, with catering and beautiful apartments and here and there you feel that past.”
