It concerns about two hundred detainees who now have to remain in their cells for almost 24 hours a day. They are not allowed to follow the regular day program. However, there is airing in small groups. “Airing is a fundamental right and we are not going to change that,” said PI spokesman René Hut RTV North.
Three of the six departments in PI Ter Apel must be quarantined for at least five days. “On the fifth day, the detainees undergo a PCR test. Depending on the results, further steps will be taken,” says Hut.
At the moment, at least 37 detainees are infected, 33 of them in one ward. In the other two departments, all detainees have yet to be tested. It is not known whether prisoners will be moved to the PI in Veenhuizen, as happened during the previous outbreak in the PI.
A year ago also major corona outbreak
It is not the first time that Ter Apel prison has been confronted with a corona outbreak. There was also a major outbreak in January 2021. After staff sounded the alarm, the prison board decided to keep everyone in jail.
Airing was also not allowed then. It caused quite a stir among family members, lawyers and members of parliament. According to lawyer Hettie Cremers, the ban on airing went against international regulations. In the end, a third of the prisoners turned out to be infected.
There was also a corona outbreak in the prison in Veenhuizen last year. At that time, a total of 23 inmates from the open ward of the prison were infected with the corona virus.
Omicron
Since the outbreak of a year ago, the PI in Ter Apel has been working with so-called compartmentalisation. This means that prisoners from different departments do not come into contact with each other.
How there can be so many infections in different departments in a short time is a mystery, according to Hut. “But it very likely has to do with the omicron variant of the virus,” he says.
Detainees without Dutch nationality
Detainees without Dutch nationality reside in the Ter Apel prison. They have to (partly) serve their sentence here and in principle are sent back to their country of origin after the sentence. There are currently more than 400 detainees.
According to Hut, the currently infected detainees only have mild complaints.