Trough capacity differentiation and job differentiation, the Belgian Prison Service wants to create a new prison culture that aims at higher quality interactions between staff and inmates, a higher degree of autonomy and participation in meaningful activities for inmates – being all determinate factors for better living conditions as well as for better working conditions for prison staff.
The inmate is guided through a humane and safe detention process in order to return to society as a law abiding citizen by deriving all the taken steps with regard to him/her from consultations within a multidisciplinary team consisting of three main actors: the detention management, the psychosocial service and the new ‘detention guides’.
The detention guides are being selected and trained in a specific way: after having participated in a common training program, they follow a specific training in individual counselling and motivation, resilience, mediation, group dynamics, Good Lives Model, managing dilemmas, multidisciplinary consultation, etc.
From September 20022 until April 2023 the new profiles of detention guides have been implemented in the small scale detention house of Kortrijk and the new prison of Haren, consistig of small living units of 30 inmates, and Dendermonde. After evaluation, the project will be implemented in other prisons as well.
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Hilde Guffens
Prison Governor, Project Leader, FOD Justitie - DG EPI, Belgium
Hilde Guffens graduated in Educational Science at the University of Louvain. After working in victim support for 8 years, she started her career within the prison service in 2000 on the project of restorative justice, both on local as on regional level. In 2005, she joined the Regional Direction North to support the local prisons and governors.
Since 2009, she was appointed as prison governor to start up the federal center for juveniles, followed by managing two other prisons in the Northern part of the country. Since 2020, she is working as the Project Leader on designing and implementing new prison officers roles in the new prisons as well as in the small scale detention houses.
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Mies Beckers
Governor, Prison of Haren, DG EPI, FOD Justitie, Belgium
Mies Beckers graduated in Criminological Sciences at the Catholic University of Leuven. After participating in an international exchange program on restorative justice and victimology in Regina (Canada), she studied at the
Université de Montréal (
Maîtrise en criminologie). During these studies, she did a research on mediation in de Canadian penitentiary system. After her studies, she started her professional career within the Belgian prison system as a restorative justice consultant in 2000, in two prisons and as coordinator at the regional level. Passing through the Regional Direction of the Northern part of the Belgian prison system, she started working as a prison governor in the prison of Leuven Centraal in 2009, followed by de prisons of St-Gilles and Haren.
