In a TikTok video that went viral last year, a hooded man kneels in the grass outside Haren Prison, Belgium’s newest high-tech correctional facility on the outskirts of Brussels. With a handmade catapult, he launches a package over the perimeter fence. Inside, an inmate’s camera catches prisoners scrambling across rooftops, clambering up mesh and wire to grab the drugs. Not a single guard is in sight.
Months later, in Antwerp, another prison scandal shook the country. A 41-year-old man, locked in an overcrowded cell with five others, was tortured for three days by fellow inmates. Footage leaked on Snapchat showed him being scalded with boiling water, beaten, sexually assaulted and forced to eat feces. The guards did not intervene. Belgium’s prison unions blamed it on overcrowding and understaffing.
Belgium’s prisons are in crisis. Hard-line policies, crumbling infrastructure and chronic staff shortages have turned them into violent, unsanitary holding pens — not just for the convicted but for the poor, the undocumented and the mentally ill. Drugs and phones circulate uncontrolled. Officers face burnout and threats. Despite decades of warnings from unions, watchdogs and European courts, there has been no meaningful reform.
The strain is perhaps felt most acutely by the people trying to hold it together. Mario Heylen, 38, worked as a prison guard in Antwerp for 17 years. These days, he splits his time between front-line duty and union work. Sitting in a hipster cafe near Antwerp’s redbrick prison, surrounded by craft beer bars and artisanal jewelers, he sips a Coke Zero, glances frequently at his smartwatch and chuckles at a low-riding car blaring past with pounding bass. His arms are inked with tribal patterns and a tattoo of Lady Justice, blindfolded and holding her scales. “Overcrowding turns prisons into pressure cookers,” he says. “And we’re the ones trying to keep the lid on.” He adds, “We’re creating more problems inside prison than these people would cause outside.”
Belgian law grants every detainee the right to their own cell. In practice, that law is routinely ignored. Many cells hold three or more people. Sometimes, four detainees sleep on mattresses on the floor in a cell meant to hold one prisoner, all sharing the same toilet. “We’re constantly forced to negotiate,” Heylen says. “Sometimes we tell them: Just hold on for 24 hours, maybe someone leaves tomorrow. But we all know we’re lying. The next guy is already waiting.”
The numbers speak for themselves. Belgium’s prisons were built for around 11,000 people but currently hold more than 13,000, making them the most crowded in Europe. In Brussels, Saint-Gilles Prison operates at nearly double its intended capacity. Older urban prisons are overcrowded due to the practice of holding detainees close to the courts handling their cases. Crime rates are higher in cities, meaning more arrests, more cases and more pretrial detentions. Saint-Gilles Prison is primarily used to detain men awaiting trial, serving short sentences or held as undocumented migrants.
Staffing levels are just as dire. Belgium has one of the lowest staff-to-inmate ratios in Europe and one of the worst recidivism rates. An alarming proportion of the country’s prison population is composed of people awaiting trial or with no criminal conviction, including migrants and the mentally ill. In Antwerp’s central prison alone, 500 people are required to run the facility safely, says ACOD, the socialist union representing more than 2,000 prison workers across Flemish-speaking Belgium. According to ACOD, in May 2025, 60 more staff were still needed in the prison, making the understaffing rate 12%.
Heylen has seen what happens when the system breaks down: There are suicides and sexual assaults, with guards frequently outnumbered and overpowered. But what haunts him most is the collapse of the people inside. “You just watch as people are left to their fate. Instead of getting help, they deteriorate. I’ve seen people go from disturbed to completely unhinged.” Despite it all, he still sees meaning in his work. “I see good in people that others have long given up on. I don’t want to be the kind of guard who just locks people away and forgets them,” he says. But now, “you can barely say two words before the next emergency drags you off.”
It’s not just guards who are sounding the alarm. The Brussels-based lawyer Agnès Piessevaux volunteers with the Central Prison Monitoring Council, a watchdog organization made up of more than 450 unpaid citizens. Each week, she visits Saint-Gilles, one of Belgium’s oldest and most overcrowded prisons. “Belgium doesn’t talk about its prisons,” she says. “And when it does, it’s only to sound tough. But the reality? The reality is abandonment.”
Inside, she observes decay and degrading conditions. “Windows are broken and covered with cardboard. The shower doesn’t work. Some rooms have blocked toilets. There are rats. I saw them.” In summer, she says, the stench inside becomes unbearable. “I can’t even stay more than a minute.” In winter, inmates endure freezing temperatures.
Many of those she visits have not been convicted of any crime. “People are in pretrial detention and sometimes don’t even know why. They haven’t seen a judge.” In 2024, more than 4,000 people behind bars in Belgium were so-called “sans-papiers”: undocumented migrants. Foreign nationals made up 42% of the total prison population, far above the European average of 27%.
“These are people who are not criminals, but have nowhere to go,” Piessevaux says.
The detainees report humiliating punishments. “When a phone is found in a cell, some guards impose full-body strip searches,” she says. “A nude search is only allowed under specific conditions — not automatically. But they keep doing it.” She has filed repeated complaints. Nothing changes. “The people who end up in prison come out even worse,” she says. “They are treated so badly, it becomes even harder to go back into society.”
“Torture” is how Erik Stuer, a bookkeeper from Temse accused of money laundering, describes his two years in pretrial detention in Saint-Gilles Prison. “There are rats running through the cells. Toilets haven’t been cleaned in years. It stinks. If you’re lucky, you get one or two showers per week. Dogs live better. It is inhumane.”
But the worst came in 2023. “There was a hit on me,” he says. A fellow inmate, a convicted murderer, stabbed him. Stuer believes that police investigating Brazilian and Portuguese money-laundering operations in Antwerp had endangered him and his daughter by using them as “whistleblowers.”
“I tried to warn them — this is very dangerous; someone will put a bullet in my head,” he says. No one listened.
After the attack and hospital, Stuer was moved to the new high-end prison in Haren, but fear and trauma stayed with him. “I couldn’t sleep anymore, I was scared. Whenever I had to go outside, to get food, to go from A to B within the prison walls, I thought anything could happen to me. I was traumatized. And they did not do anything to help me.” It took a year for him to see a Dutch-speaking psychologist who prescribed him eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, developed to treat people with severe psychological trauma. The authorities denied him access to treatment.
In his office in downtown Brussels, Robby De Kaey argues that deterioration is no accident. De Kaey leans back in his chair behind his desk, which is adorned with a red-framed portrait of Che Guevara and a sculpture of a raised fist. A former prison officer who spent two decades working behind bars, he now serves as federal secretary of ACOD.
“The system is being radicalized and ridiculed,” De Kaey says. “You have prisoners in Haren who show off with the champagne and lobster they managed to smuggle in.” On TikTok, inmates flaunt smuggled phones and livestream staff with the phones the raids were meant to seize. “The result: fear, burnout and rising [post-traumatic stress disorder] among prison workers,” he says.
For De Kaey, Belgium’s prison crisis didn’t come out of nowhere; it was engineered by political choice. Until recently, people sentenced to less than three years were rarely imprisoned, a practical way to relieve pressure on the system. But in 2022, that changed. “The prisons were already full,” he says, “and still they decided to cram in more people.” The system is now stretched to breaking point.
“It’s a right-wing move,” De Kaey says. The public, he argues, demands harsh penalties — life sentences and the symbolic severity of “bread and water” — and politicians are eager to capitalize on that sentiment to showcase their toughness on crime. In practice, lenient policies were rolled back and punitive ones expanded. Short sentences, once routinely suspended, are now enforced. Immigration crackdowns fill cells with undocumented residents. “It’s easier to get put in jail, and it’s become harder to get out and stay out.”
For him, the staffing shortage is hardly surprising. The job of prison officer is poorly paid, dangerous and increasingly unattractive. “The risks are high, the salaries aren’t great and the conditions are bad,” he says. “To become a police officer, you train for three years. In prison, it’s just a few weeks. You feel that lack of preparation every day on the floor.”
The result is not just overcrowding, it’s a penitentiary system in which criminal networks thrive. Belgium’s prison crisis is inseparable from the rise of drug-fueled organized crime in the country. Nowhere is this more visible than in Antwerp, Europe’s second-largest port and a key entry point for South American cocaine. In recent years, the city has faced gangland killings, grenade attacks and Kalashnikov shoot-outs.
That violence doesn’t stop at the prison gate. “Antwerp is the European drug capital. There’s probably more cocaine in your ice cubes than in most wallets in Belgium,” says Heylen, the prison guard. The consequences are stark: “You get a very different kind of clientele now, much less inhibited.” Inside prison, “the drug problem is enormous. There’s a lot of drug use and that leads to aggression, threats, smuggling, extortion.” Heylen compares the conditions in Belgian prisons to those depicted in Hollywood films about bleak, inhumane prisons in the United States.
In 2024 alone, authorities found 526 mobile phones and recorded 564 cases of drug possession in Antwerp Prison, totalling nearly 22 pounds of narcotics. Inmates coordinate shipments, order hits and settle scores from behind bars. “They have all the means to just continue calmly from inside. They’re shielded, safe from outside threats,” Heylen says.
The boundary between prison and the outside world is fraying — and so is safety. Colleagues have been threatened on the street by former inmates. “Once, I was a hair away from taking a knife between the ribs,” Heylen says. “Since November, we’ve had six or seven cases of firebombs at cars, at front doors. … They’re now even putting trackers under our cars to find out where we live. You get death threats. Your family gets death threats.” He asks: “Do we really have to wait for someone to die before anyone reacts?”
The consequences aren’t limited to Antwerp. In Brussels, Piessevaux sees the same tensions. Last year, a man was hospitalized after being forced to smuggle drugs into the prison inside his body. “Some inmates now fear going outside for their daily walk,” she says. “And so they simply choose to stay inside all day.” Violence is also rising because prisoners are frustrated that they can’t access health care or education, due to understaffing.
As drug cartels create chaos behind bars, jails are also collapsing under the weight of another crisis: untreated mental illness. In a Brussels cafe lined with wood paneling and soccer club paraphernalia, 39-year-old Brecht Verbrugghe drinks his coffee black. He works in Haren, the high-tech prison where catapults deliver drugs. “It looks new. But in practice, it’s an old prison: punishment, incarceration, deprivation.”
The $450 million complex, opened in 2022, was touted as the state-of-the-art solution: safe, humane, efficient. Yet Haren is already grappling with overcrowding and the same systemic issues. Staff shortages have kept six of seven libraries shut. Inmates sleep on mattresses on floors. Legal visits and medical referrals are hard to organize due to the prison’s remote location. The only good news, said Verbrugghe, was that staff at Haren were “more motivated.”
But one gaping problem remains. “Belgium’s prisons have become its biggest psychiatric institutions — by default, not by design,” he says. Between 2019 and 2024, the number of so-called “internees” — prisoners with severe mental health conditions — doubled to over 1,000. Yet there are only 500 dedicated beds nationwide. Care is falling seriously short: Belgium’s prison suicide rate is nearly triple the European average.
Prisons function as backstops for social failure, Verbrugghe argues. “It’s not about pathology. It’s a social selection: poor people, often with a migration background, who didn’t get help anywhere else, ended up in prison.”
Piessevaux sees the consequences firsthand, when punishments are ordered by guards in Saint-Gilles. “They call it suicide prevention,” she says. “But it’s really just solitary confinement. There is nothing [in the solitary cells]. Not even a camping light. Just a kind of bed. And a toilet that stinks really bad. They have to stay for a week without anything.”
The law says internees, pretrial detainees and convicted prisoners must be separated. But that policy is routinely ignored. In Antwerp, “every new arrival signs a form acknowledging they agree to be mixed in with others,” says De Kaey. “If they refuse, they’re put in isolation. No yard time, no visits, no classes.” He sighs and adds, “If you try to exercise your rights, you get locked away alone.”
That same logic governs care. “One colleague had to medicate a prisoner by secretly dissolving pills in his coffee,” De Kaey says. “He told me, ‘I’m a security officer. I have no medical training. I don’t feel good about slipping something into someone’s coffee without them knowing.’” He shakes his head. “It’s something from a hundred years ago.”
Even designated psychiatric wings are overwhelmed. In Antwerp, Heylen says the dedicated section for internees is full. “So the worst cases end up in normal wings. That creates an explosive mix, and we’re the ones who have to handle it. We’re not trained for that.” On most blocks, he says, there are four or five such cases.
In December 2024, the Council of Europe urged Belgium to fix what it called a “structural problem.” The government’s response: more prisons, stopgap measures like rotating detainees month-on, month-off, or outsourcing detention to Kosovo. But those working on the inside say the foundations remain unchanged.
“It’s damage control. They’re not given care. They’re removed from view,” Verbrugghe says. “Investing in new buildings doesn’t change who ends up inside. It only makes the system look more acceptable. And that makes it easier to keep locking people up.”
Despite warnings from experts, the government’s response has focused largely on expanding capacity through quick fixes rather than addressing root causes. In April 2025, Justice Minister Annelies Verlinden and the federal Cabinet approved a broad reform plan that includes the installation of “prefabricated prison cells” — essentially container units — to rapidly expand capacity.
A draft emergency law currently under parliamentary review proposes earlier release or electronic monitoring for certain nonviolent offenders to reduce overcrowding. Verlinden indicated that, if the law passes, up to 700 prisoners could be released early in the coming months, creating space to gradually enforce thousands of postponed sentences. The Ministry of Justice did not respond to written inquiries and requests for comment.
Wim Ipers, who has spent 27 years teaching prisoners — first literacy, now communication and assertiveness skills, running role-play sessions in Haren Prison — believes change is possible. “We talk about learning to say sorry, to stand up for yourself,” Ipers says. “One of my guys told me, ‘I’ve never said sorry to anyone in my life.’ That really struck me.”
But even modest and promising efforts are thwarted. “The buildings are fine,” Ipers says, “but if you have a chronic staff shortage, everything breaks down. It’s a domino effect. One thing fails, the rest follows.” Haren’s reform model split staff into “security officers” and “detention supervisors” to foster rehabilitation. But the posts remain unfilled. “We’re missing 200 full-time people. Kitchens stay closed. Classes are cancelled.”
What frustrates Ipers most is the refusal to change. “We know what works,” he says. “I’ve seen it in Norway. A humane approach, proper reintegration, trained staff. It’s more expensive. But it brings recidivism down from 70% to 20%. The only thing that’s missing here is will.” In Belgium now, 25% of prisoners reoffend within two years of being released.
Ipers believes that the solution should be found “at the higher level” and points to “the gentlemen and ladies, ministers and Cabinet staff who have let the entire carceral sector rot for decades.” Why? “Well, it’s not popular, of course. It’s not sexy. Because people in detention aren’t allowed to vote. There’s no political gain to be made in this case.”
Stuer is still entangled in the Belgian justice system. “I was only released from pretrial detention because my lawyer and I were able to point out procedural errors,” the former prisoner says. “Now I am fighting the system. I don’t think I’ll succeed, because everyone protects each other. But I want justice for myself.”
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