The staff shortage in the prison system is large and “cannot be solved in the coming years”, Minister Franc Weerwind (Legal Protection) said in a debate with the House of Representatives. The Custodial Institutions Agency (DJI) has a thousand unfilled vacancies out of a total of 15,000 FTEs. Part of the House of Representatives does not want to accept that the staff shortage will not be resolved more quickly.
SP Member of Parliament Michiel van Nispen wants Weerwind’s guarantee that “this heavy work should not be done with fewer people in the future”. Weerwind cannot give that guarantee, but agrees with the House that things should be done differently. “I look for intelligent work structures to cope with the work.” It was not clear in the debate what he meant by that.
System squeaks and creaks
The House of Representatives notes that the prison system “squeaks and creaks”, as PvdA Member of Parliament Songül Mutluer put it. According to VVD MP Ulysse Ellian, the many incidents of the past few months could have been prevented if there had been no staff shortage.
He referred, among other things, to the escape of two TBS’ers from the Pompekliniek in Nijmegen last June and the hostage-taking and stabbing in the Den Hey-Acker youth prison in Breda. “The care for detainees falls short,” Van Nispen added to the list.
Mutluer and also D66 MP Joost Sneller believe that incidents can no longer be discussed, but see them as symptoms of a “sick system”, Mutluer said. “In some places the basics are not in order,” said Sneller.
The bottlenecks in the chain are “recognisable”, Weerwind said. According to the minister, the DJI does everything it can to recruit and retain personnel, but that is extremely difficult in this tight labor market.