With Europe facing two distinct challenges as a result of the ongoing refugee crisis (which in recent months has been tamed as a result Turkey withholding further immigrant outflows via the land route if only for the time being until Erdogan changes his mind and asks for more concessions), namely how to keep track of the hundreds of thousands of new immigrants, and also where to house them, the Netherlands has successfully killed these two birds with one stone.
According to the AP, with crime declining in the Netherlands, the country is looking at new ways to fill its prisons. In the past, the government has let Belgium and Norway put prisoners in empty cells and now, amid the huge flow of migrants into Europe, several Dutch prisons have been temporarily pressed into service as asylum-seeker centers.
The good news is that, according to AP, most of the 12 former prisons and jails housing asylum seekers have been so transformed that they are barely recognizable as former places of involuntary detention, though in some cases the thick cell doors and bars on windows are stark reminders of the past. The bad news is that thousands of refugees are currently living in prisons.
Prisons in the cities of Haarlem and Arnhem, with their distinctive domed roofs and circular galleries of cells around a central covered courtyard, are considered national monuments and cannot be renovated. Even so, with just under 60,000 migrants arriving in the Netherlands last year, they have been temporarily pressed into service to house hundreds of asylum seekers.
"We had to think twice about using prisons with (cell) doors," said Janet Helder, a board member with the Dutch government agency responsible for housing asylum seekers. "Some people in the neighborhood asked, 'how can you put people from Syria who may have been imprisoned there in a cell here?' So we decided that if people really have a problem with it we will find somewhere else for them."
What she said next may sound somewhat strange if taken out of context, or even in its proper context: "the prisons often are well suited to their new use" Helder added whose organization currently is housing some 41,000 people at 120 locations throughout the Netherlands. Surely, millions of Germans, Austrians, Scandinavians and Central European would agree.
That said, the prison amenities are great: "the rooms are intended for one or two people, there are often gyms, a good kitchen," she said. "So in that sense they tick many of the boxes we are looking at."
Asylum seekers had few complaints about "living" in jail beyond gripes about the food. While they live in prisons, they are free to leave the buildings and grounds during the day and even spend some nights away.
Abdul Moeen Alhaji, a 16-year-old Syrian, is happy to call a prison cell in Arnhem home after initially staying in a tent in a temporary camp outside the city of Nijmegen. "I don't feel that it is a prison," he said. "What matters is that we are safe here."
Menno Schot, who runs the center in the Haarlem prison, says staffers try to help the 400 migrants adapt to Dutch life as they wait for the lengthy asylum process to start. It is unclear if that involves cartoon-based education about sex as in the case of Germany.
For 18-year-old Gerbia Hajji, a Yazidi from Sinjar, Iraq, that has meant practicing riding one of the Netherlands' ubiquitous bicycles in a courtyard at the Haarlem prison. Her husband, Yassir, was a barber back home and wants to learn Dutch so that he can pick up his trade again. He was keeping his skills up to date recently by shaping his wife's eyebrows in the cell they share on the third floor of the Haarlem prison.
In a nearby cell, a single flower taped to its door, Hamed Karmi was also practicing — playing a keyboard while his wife, Farishta Morahami, sat on the bunk bed in their cell listening to the music, a calming way to spend a few minutes for the young couple who fled a village near the Afghan capital, Kabul, amid rising Taliban attacks. They paid smugglers $8,000 to get to Europe.
"Their safety is our main priority along with their health and daily needs," Schot said of the prison's new residents. "The country is new for them so we are their guide in Holland."
We can only assume that the safety of native citizens is just as high on the list of priorities.