Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[martinuzz]

Haha yeah. Prisoner accomodation is becoming a Dutch specialty, or so it seems. I think our prisons now house Swedes and Belgians, maybe Norwegians too. Legal human trafficking, it's almost like being back in the old colonial days.

EDIT: it's Norwegians, not Swedes. Sweden has low prison popultations like us.

[Sheb]

Didn't you stop with the Belgians?

[martinuzz]

Oh, you're right. The Belgian government decided to stop leasing Dutch cells. The last Belgian inmates are expeced to be returned to Belgium in december 2016. Didn't know that ended. Isn't overcrowding still a problem in Belgian prisons?

Could be it's a money issue. Dutch prisoners are the most expensive prisoners of all EU countries. Think they cost about 250 euro per day.

[Sheb]

The original deal was for three years, not sure why they didn't. I think it's a mixture of the high cost of renting Dutch prison space, and the fact that we've been building new prisons ourselves so that the need is less as capacity increase, but it's surprisingly hard to find info on this.

Edit: apparently they did manage to reduce overpopulation a fair bit, we now have "only" 10% more prisoners than we have bed (although some prisons still are overpopulated). They did it in large part by shifting mentally ill patients to proper institutions.

There is also a relatively ambitious program of prison construction underway, including a mega prison of 1200 places at Haren (To compare, total prisoners population in Belgium in about 11.000). Looking at new construction alone, I've seen at least 4 new jails totally over 1500 places since 2014 (Some of that capacity will be used to host prisoners while older prisons are being renovated).

[Loud Whispers]

It's funny because I was just reading a friend's master thesis about Belgian diplomacy during the building of the Union in 1958-1963, and a big fear of Belgium and the Netherlands was an hegemonic Franco-German duo that would undermine NATO if defense discussion were to take place between the Six. Getting the UK within the European framework was seen by the Low Countries as a way to counteract the Franco-German and make sure Europe wouldn't concurrence NATO (The Dutch position was essentially "Either you let the UK in or you let us create EU-wide institution so we don't end up as French protectorate".

Problem with that framework is that the UK foreign office went from wanting to enlargen the European Union so as to halt integration, to wanting to enlargen the European Union and hasten integration. Dutch attempts to retard European integration were ignored by the European Union, and Belgium doesn't ever do anything on its own. Thus all European Nations would be defeated by being played against themselves, whereas now the UK will not be used as a door stopper and the Netherlands is free to choose whichever way it wishes to go

[Sheb]

I had trouble parsing this stuff. When did the switch occurs, according to you?

[Silverthrone]

I thought I'd contribute, for once. You know that grenade attack in Sweden? Well, strap in.

Brief summary; it's part of a gangland conflict in port city of Gothenburg. Last spring, one gang burst into a pub in council estate land with an assault rifle and killed a rival gang leader, one bystander and injured eight others (several permanently). The grenade attack was one of several retaliation gestures. It's part of a much longer conflict in the city, between different gangs, in this case local street gangs. The suburb in question (Biskopsgården) has been more or less divided between two groups, north and south. They're the ones up in arms in this particular case, although there are other gangland conflicts going on across the city. Shootings between them are fairly common. There might be an ethnic/tribal element in this particular conflict, as several of the suspects in the pub shooting were Somalian. The word on the street is that there is, but I can't really say what's what in that question.

The child, poor Yusuf, 8, was in Gothenburg on holiday, and his family rented the flat. One of the suspects for the pub shooting (currently undergoing second rounds in the trials, I believe) was listed at the flat. He is the second child to be killed in the gang conflicts. Luna, age 4, was killed last summer. The car she was in had been fitted with a car bomb, meant for another passenger.
Neither was the intended target, but bystanders are not something the gangs seem to give one shit about. Of course, the current crisis in the Swedish police doesn't help. Or the hopeless integration situation. Or the immigration crisis. Or the big, knotty mess of ideals, politics, prestige, pride, stubborness, zeal and shouting that the political situation has gotten in to. Or the islamic movement picking up speed. Or the counter-movements, or the awful state of low-income suburbia that spawned this mess.

I can reveal that this is the genuine Sweden Experience^TM at the moment:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I like my country, but it's difficult to not feel faintly ashamed sometimes.

[Sheb]

I like my country, but it's difficult to not feel faintly ashamed sometimes.

Hey, that's alright, we all get through there. I mean, all countries got shit going on.

[Silverthrone]

I like my country, but it's difficult to not feel faintly ashamed sometimes.

Hey, that's alright, we all get through there. I mean, all countries got shit going on.

Well, true. Every country that exists does so because it made it through some proper shit at several points. Keep calm and drink vodka carry on, I suppose.

[Sheb]

What you're going through doesn't even qualify as proper shit methink. You should get invaded by the Germans from time to time, it helps relativize. :p

[Silverthrone]

What you're going through doesn't even qualify as proper shit methink. You should get invaded by the Germans from time to time, it helps relativize. :p

Well, true that, too. Although the Russians are making vague motions at trying, that is more or less a nostalgia trip at this point. Fish swim, grass grow and the Russian is eyeing up that Baltic coastline.

[Helgoland]

What you're going through doesn't even qualify as proper shit methink. You should get invaded by the Germans from time to time, it helps relativize. :p

Best reason to re-introduce the GDR: Finally Germans too can be afraid of being invaded by Germany!

[martinuzz]

Well, AfD is on the rise.

If anyone had predicted 25 years ago that a populist nationalist party would get a foothold in Germany ever again, they would have been locked in an insane asylum.

[scriver]

What you're going through doesn't even qualify as proper shit methink. You should get invaded by the Germans from time to time, it helps relativize. :p

I highly doubt you know enough to comment.

[Helgoland]

If anyone had predicted 25 years ago that a populist nationalist party would get a foothold in Germany ever again, they would have been locked in an insane asylum.

I dunno. There were in the past the Schill Party and the Republicans, so it's not entirely unprecedented. It's just that we used to believe there was some magical national political immune system that made stuff like that go away within a couple months...