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Introduction
Yearly, approximately 33,000 people enter prisons in the Netherlands (De Looff et al., 2017). In order to be able to minimise the harmful consequences of imprisonment, it is important to gather information about the conditions of confinement and its impact on the well-being and behaviour of prisoners. The Dutch Life in Custody (LIC) Study was designed to fulfil this purpose and to systematically collect information on prison climate, its determinants, and its consequences. The study was developed for research and management purposes and therefore accommodated requests from the Dutch Prison Service as well as research interests for a new and unique study on prison climate in the Netherlands. The combined interest was a large benefit for this study, since it remains a challenge to conduct research on imprisonment. In particular, it can be difficult to achieve access to prisons for research purposes and to recruit a representative sample of participants. Furthermore, it is a challenge to address topics and research questions that are of interest to policy makers, practitioners and researchers. The Dutch LIC study does precisely that. It has a methodologically strong design with a large population-based sample of all adult prisoners in Dutch facilities. The objectives of this article are: to describe the Dutch prison population regarding their perceptions of the prison climate, and to explore differences in perceptions of the prison climate across prisoners in different prison regimes. For this purpose, we used survey results from the prison climate questionnaire (PCQ), distributed among the population of adult prisoners in the Netherlands.
Imprisonment in the Netherlands
There is no uniform characterisation of imprisonment in the Netherlands. While conditions could be characterised as favourable given the low incarceration rate and interest in a positive prison climate, the government has introduced various austerity measures and a differentiation in privilege levels. Prisons in the Netherlands have recently received media attention due to the rather unusual situation of empty cells and prisons and a falling prison population (Ash, 2016; Cluskey, 2017). Despite a spike in the imprisonment rate in 2005, the rate of imprisonment in the Netherlands remains comparatively low at 51 per 100,000 inhabitants (Aebi et al., 2018). The recent drop in the prison population has been accompanied by a range of budget...