San Francisco Frontiers - Belgian prison tour lays bare grim reality of life behind bars

Until it was officially shuttered in 2022, the dilapidated Forest prison housed inmates in cramped cells behind its red brick walls in the Belgian capital.

Leading a group of AFP journalists along the empty corridors now spattered with pigeon droppings, Manuel Lambert, head of a charity called 9-square-metres, laid bare the issues.

His organisation takes its name from the standard cell size in Belgium, usually meant for two detainees but where three often have to squeeze together day and night.

Lambert says that as the system has been stretched to breaking point, conditions have worsened and efforts to reintegrate prisoners into society have been neglected.

"These questions are being ignored," he warned.

"It was essential for us to have a place to address them, to make this former prison an educational tool," explained Lambert, who has a list of around 3,000 people waiting to make a visit.

Belgium is among a number of European countries facing endemic prison overcrowding.

For months, there have been more than 13,000 inmates in Belgium's 39 prisons, which have a capacity of approximately 11,000 places.

To ease pressures, the government proposed a series of emergency measures in March, including using electronic tags for those given sentences of fewer than 18 months. Those measures still need to go before parliament.

- 'Complete mess' -

Opened in 1910, Forest prison was built with four wings splayed out in a star around a central watchtower, meant to echo the "Panopticon" style promoted by English 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

By the end of its use, it had become a symbol of the crumbling facilities that saw Belgium condemned repeatedly at the European Court of Human Rights for "inhuman or degrading treatment".

In 2017, an inmate at the prison was awarded damages by the court after lodging a complaint that he was forced to share his cell with two others and only had access to showers twice a week.

As he led the tour, Lambert recounted how detainees in some cells that lacked proper toilets would have to empty out their buckets of waste at a "dump" each morning.

Joining the visit was a former detainee, there to film an educational video, who gave his name as Johnny T.

He had spent seven years behind bars, including in Forest, and remembered the daily "ritual" of carrying out the buckets.

"That's how it was here as recently as 2022, and other prisons in Belgium face the same problem," said the man in his 30s.

"Prison is frankly a complete mess! I say to the younger generation -- don't listen to the older lot who want to steer you down this path."

Currently, due to overcrowding across the prison system, 663 inmates in Belgium are sleeping on mattresses on the floor, the prison service says.

Of these, 156 are in the new Brussels prison in Haren.

The state-of-the-art facility, to which the inmates of Forest were transferred three and a half years ago ands which was supposed, in theory, to accommodate them in far better conditions.

Q.Nelson--SFF