In youth prison Den Hey-Acker in Breda it went wrong again on Friday at the end of the afternoon. A 19-year-old man died in a stabbing within the prison walls. It is the umpteenth incident in a series of violent incidents within the juvenile detention center.
In January, the youth prison in Breda was still in the news because of an escaped 21-year-old prisoner. He had held prison staff hostage at gunpoint. He later died in a shootout with the police in Belgium.
In the past, the juvenile detention center was regularly discredited. In 2007 and 2009 a prisoner already escaped. And in 2011, someone even ran three times, with a fugitive inmate disappearing from the radar for more than two weeks in April.
It didn’t stop there. In August 2012, an asylum seeker escaped from the institution. A detainee did the same in 2014 during his supervised leave. And Luciano D. also showed this trick in 2017, after he also managed to break out of the juvenile detention center in Lelystad at the end of 2015.
chilling robbery
In 2017, the youth institution once again made the headlines when two young men from the institution committed a terrifying home robbery in Ulvenhout.
The resident of the house sustained permanent brain damage after the perpetrators assaulted him and his family with a baseball bat. One perpetrator was in the last phase of his return to society, his companion was on probation for a weekend.
violent outburst
In an outbreak of violence within the prison walls in 2020, a group of young people in the youth institution went so wild that an employee locked himself up to guarantee his own safety.
According to union director Yntse Koenen, the fact that it is so often hit in Den Hey-Acker has to do with the staff shortage in the institution. The workload is high, with too little manpower. “There is also only mild punishment if a prisoner makes a mistake, because they are still young and in treatment. It all means that security guards often do not feel safe. That has to change,” he said in January, after a 21-year-old prisoner had escaped and was shot dead by the police in Belgium.
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