From Panopticon to pleasure dome: Dutch prisons transformed

You might assume that the 40 metre-high dome in the Dutch city of Haarlem is a religious building, said The Guardian – “until you notice the bars covering its 230 windows”.

The Haarlem Koepelgevangenis (“dome prison”) is just one of three so-called panopticons in the Netherlands: circular prisons with a central watch tower, built in the 19th century and designed to oppress inmates. All three have been closed in the past decade, as part of the country’s drive to reduce its prison population, and are being “repurposed”.

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No panopticons were ever built in the UK. But the Netherlands emerged as the “unwitting ‘heartland’ of panopticon design”, said The Guardian. The three structures in Haarlem, Breda and Arnhem were designed in the 1880s by Dutch architect Johan Frederik Metzelaar and his son Willem Cornelis, who “praised Bentham’s design for restricting interactions between prisoners, who were in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day”.

In 2022, however, following a “grassroots initiative led by the local population”, it reopened as a cultural hub and community space. Nearly all the cells are rented; there is a “podcast studio, art school ateliers and gallery spaces”, with a cinema bar and a café on the ground floor. The refurbishment has “generated hundreds of jobs”, and up to 1,500 people visit the building every day.

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Amazon rents a space on the third floor, where cells have been converted into office spaces. The Amazon Web Service logo is “plastered just above the cell numbers”, said Business Insider. Many social media users “noted the irony” of Amazon renting an office in a former prison, given the “widespread reporting” of allegations that Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers are “overworked, oversurveilled and underpaid”.

They are among more than 20 Dutch prisons to have closed in the past decade, as the country’s prison population has fallen by more than 40% over the past 20 years. The incarceration rate per capita in the Netherlands is now half that of the UK, and there are “far fewer” repeat offenders. “At times, the Netherlands has even resorted to importing convicts from abroad to fill its empty cells and keep some prisons open.”

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