Social defence in Belgium : between care and security. An empirical approach

Under the Belgian Law of Social Defense, offenders found unfit to stand a trial are transferred to psychiatric wards of prisons, to special high-security psychiatric hospitals or to simple psychiatric hospitals. Belgian Law sees this confinement as a way to both keep security and give access to mental-health care. But in reality, in the psychiatric wards of Belgian prisons and in the high-security psychiatric hospitals, the space given to mental-health care is very problematic: services are underfinanced, drug treatment is systematic and these confinement places are very often overcrowded. The separation between evaluation tasks and caring tasks, which has been recently enforced in some places of confinement, marks a very important issue.