“I’m exactly the same as twenty-seven years ago.” Luc, played by actor Dennis Rudge, pronounces the words calmly and resignedly. He talks about his life in prison and emphasizes that you don’t actually make new memories there. Every day is similar, there are no stimuli, there is hardly any spiritual development possible.
Dennis Rudge plays the role of the detainee Luc in the theater monologue One of usbased on the novel of the same name by Christine Otten. She based the story on her experiences in a prison, where she gave writing workshops to interested inmates for the past six years. Otten: „For an article in Free Netherlands I spent two months in a prison and then I started a writing course there. The workshops give the detainees back a sense of freedom. Before your eyes you see people taking back their humanity by writing down their frustrations and desires and sharing them with each other. There is also a lot of talent emerging – people are really discovering their writing.”
Eventually Otten . founded Blocknotes Foundation with whom she now organizes workshops in four penitentiary institutions. She also developed the concept of the theater performance Prison monologues (2017), linking authors Herman Koch and Manon Uphoff to two ex-prisoners. Based on those conversations, the authors (including Otten himself) each wrote a monologue, which Otten forged into a theater text. Directed by Kasper Kapteijn, the performance was shown in more than twenty former prisons. It was a great success: the third part of the series is now in preparation.
Otten: „We played the performance for mixed audiences, which consisted of inmates, prison professionals and other spectators. We noticed that there is a great need in society to hear these kinds of stories, as a counterbalance to the call for increasingly harsh punishments. With the Prison monologues and One of us we want to show what it means to be isolated from society for years and what that does to someone.”
Except for the Netherlands, there is almost no country in Europe where life is really life
Han Moraal chairman RSJ
One of us again for directing. Kapteijn: „The question in a monologue is always: what is the conflict? The actor is on stage alone, so it will always have to be about an inner struggle, in this case about how to survive without a past and without a future. In the performance we follow Luc, sentenced to life in prison, as he struggles with his demons: in order not to break down, he has decided to banish all hope from his life, he has even chosen not to allow a visit from his family. But then he begins to bond with a young fellow inmate, for whom he begins to play a kind of father role. Eventually that boy is released, and then Luc is thrown back on himself.”
Actor Dennis Rudge: “It’s about the struggle of such a man. You can’t sustain completely shutting down emotionally, but connecting also comes with danger. How do you deal with the pain of emotions that you cannot express and that you cannot share with anyone?”
Punished for life
With the performance, the makers want to create a better understanding of those who have been sentenced to life in prison. For this reason private performances are also organized for prison staff, lawyers and civil servants. Otten: “At the moment, the theme of lifelong is a hot topic. While inmates given life sentences could theoretically be pardoned, that has not happened between 1986 and 2021 – with the exception of one inmate who was terminally ill and died shortly after his release. Successive justice ministers did not approve, because society was calling for more and more harshness towards convicted criminals.”
It was one of the reasons for the Council for the Administration of Criminal Justice and Juvenile Protection (RSJ) to advice Lifetime revision to publish. In it, the Council argues in favor of removing the pardon decision from the minister and submitting it to the courts. Minister for Legal Protection Franc Weerwind (D66) announced earlier this year that he would reconsider the pardon procedure, and confirmed in June that he intends to follow the RSJ’s advice.
One of us became played for the RSJ last week, in the National Monument De Remise in The Hague. The performance was followed by a discussion with Otten, Kapteijn, Rudge and Khalil, one of the inmates on whom the performance is based. He tells the audience that he has been Luc’s ‘neighbour’ for seven years and that he himself took part in Otten’s workshops. “When you do something creative in prison, you are often treated like a child: whether what you make is good or bad, you always get positive feedback. It was different with Christine: she valued us, and she could also strongly criticize what we wrote. Then you feel taken seriously as a person again.”
grace
Khalil also broaches the subject of the pardon procedure. “The problem is that the majority of all life sentences have no idea how to qualify for pardon. As a result, the process often starts years later than is actually possible.”
Han Moraal, the general chairman of the RSJ explains that the situation in the Netherlands is quite exceptional. “There is hardly any country in Europe where life really is life. There is always a pardon process that can actually lead to pardon or another possibility of early release. The Dutch government should guarantee a humane criminal policy and life imprisonment with no actual possibility of release, which is more or less the practice in the Netherlands, is not part of this. In Curaçao, Aruba and Sint Maarten, the request for parole is already being assessed by a judge.”
How do you deal with the pain of emotions that you cannot express and that you cannot share with anyone?
Khalid ex-convict
According to Moraal, justice ministers have always been hesitant about requests for clemency because of the call for harsher sentences from society. “But in practice, citizens do see the reasonableness of the penalty if you involve them in the decision-making process. I used to be the chief public prosecutor in Groningen, and we organized there together with Newspaper of the North so-called lay courts. The citizens who took part in it came to roughly the same verdicts as the judges in the case.”
Not easily forgotten
Asked what they thought of the performance, the members of the RSJ reacted divided. Some have been touched by the oppressiveness of the performance, and find that the reality of imprisonment with no prospect of release comes across well. Someone said they will not easily forget the performance. One of the judges present asks whether Otten would also like to come and play the performance for her colleagues.
Another judge finds the attitude of the theater makers presumptuous, as if she herself hadn’t thought long and broadly about the fate of life imprisonment from her position. “As an RSJ member, we come into contact with detainees a lot, because we also deal with their complaints and make statements about it. I don’t think the performance added anything to my own experiences.”
Perhaps that would make the performance more appropriate for an audience of civil servants. One of us is played in November at the Ministry of Justice for the minister and his officials.