Restorative detention or ‘work on self’? Two accounts of a Belgian prison policy

Abstract

Besides being known for population overcrowding, prison staff strikes, and prisoner suicides or escapes, which are frequently reported by the press, prison might also be a place for rare innovative projects. One such project can be seen in a penitentiary policy initiated in Belgium in 2000 aimed at re-shaping the culture of detention towards a culture of ‘restorative justice’. What can be said of this attempt at introducing the concepts of victim, restoration, responsibilization, sensitizing and awareness within prison walls? The present article proposes an illustrative and interpretive account of this prison policy. Rather than restoring the broken victim-offender relationship, its implementation has something to do with detainees working on their ‘self’.

Translating inclusion for students with visual impairment and special educational needs in French-speaking Belgian school organizations

“…An empirical-conceptual account proposed by Callon describes the process of defining a concrete problem -here the inclusion of a blind student in a regular secondary school. Callon (1984) outlines four "moments" (or steps) that mark out the process: problematization, interessement, enrolment, and mobilization (Dubois & Vrancken, 2015).…”

“…Problematization, according to Dubois & Vrancken (2015) means articulating problems. In our paper, the problem that various actors are articulating is the inclusion of a blind student into a regular secondary school in French-speaking Belgium (Willem, 2017).…”

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The policy implementation of "reasonable adjustments", a recent education inclusion policy that requires regular school and school governance to accommodate students with special needs, places the responsibility on several key actors, who become important gatekeepers in the process of enabling educational access to regular schooling and opportunities to students with special educational needs (Verhoeven & Dubois-Shaik, 2021). This paper tries to reveal through discursive policy and narrative analysis (Czarniawska, 2004), how the inclusion policy is translated (Callon, 1984;Dubois & Vrancken, 2015) for including a student with visual impairment in a regular secondary school (Willems, 2017). These sensitive negotiations take place in what we identify in this paper as a soft policy (Lawn, 2006).

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Twenty Years of Restorative Justice in Belgian Prisons: Traces and Critical Questions

“…and compensation programmes (with the help of the Compensation Fund) 5 (Dubois, 2012a). Thanks to the work of RJAs, some RJ-oriented activities, and associated words, talks and gestures were introduced into Belgian prisons (Dubois & Vrancken, 2015). To ensure these activities could take place, the RJAs spent a large part of their time informing the various categories of actors (prisoners, prison guards and governors, psychosocial teams, prison registry etc.)…”

Stumbling on the rehabilitation gold? Foucault vs. Foucault in San Quentin and beyond

“…After its ‘curious eclipse’ (Wacquant, 2002), the light of prison ethnography may once again be starting to shine (e.g. Drake et al., 2015; Dubois and Vrancken, 2014). Relatedly, after decades of assuming that ‘nothing works,’ criminologists and other experts appear once again to be ‘taking rehabilitation seriously’ (Cullen, 2012: 103, 111).…”