Are nonprofit prisons an alternative? Some experiences in the Netherlands

• Author: Mattheus Wassenaar,Toon Molleman,Raymond Gradus
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21306
• Date: 01 June 2018
• Published date: 01 June 2018

RESEARCH NOTE

Are nonprofit prisons an alternative? Some

experiences in the Netherlands

Mattheus Wassenaar

1

| Raymond Gradus

1

| Toon Molleman

2

1

School of Business and Economics, Vrije

Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The

Netherlands

2

Custodial Institutions Agency, The Hague,

The Netherlands

Correspondence

Mattheus Wassenaar, School of Business and

Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De

Boelelaan 1105 1081 HV Amsterdam, The

Netherlands.

Email: m.c.wassenaar@vu.nl

Outsourcing of detention is complex due to quality risks

from incomplete contracts, the public responsibility for

sentencing and execution, and related social opinions. In

the Netherlands, prison services are extensively

outsourced—particularly for juveniledetention and internal

forensic psychiatric care—to nonprofit organizations. In

the Dutch experience, we have not found differences

between public and nonprofit execution with respect to the

type of contract, costs, performance indicators such as

escapes and violence against personnel. The Dutch experi-

ence shows that outsourcing to nonprofit organizations can

be an alternative to outsourcing to privateentrepreneurs.

KEYWORDS

contracting out, nonprofit organizations, prison services

1|INTRODUCTION

In recent decades, in a number of Western countries, detention has been increasingly executed by

private firms as there was belief that private prisons were more efficient. However, more recent evi-

dence on the cost advantages of private detention is ambiguous (Kish & Lipton, 2013; Lundahl,

Kunz, Brownell, Harris, & van Vleet, 2007; Pratt & Maahs, 1999). Moreover, the theoretical litera-

ture describes a large number of risks associated with outsourcing prison services to the private sec-

tor due to the potential incomplete contracts in which quality is hard to define adequately (Hart,

Shleifer, & Vishny, 1997). Glaeser and Shleifer (2001) showed that the nonprofit status of private

entrepreneurs weakens the incentives to maximize profits. Therefore, nonprofit outsourcing of prison

services might be an alternative.

In this paper, we investigate public versus nonprofit outsourcing of detention in the Nether-

lands.

1

This paper adds to the literature in at least two aspects. Studies on the outsourcing of prison

services are based on experiences in the private—for-profit—sector. As far as we know, this is the

first description in literature on the outsourcing of detention to nonprofit organizations. Secondly, it

describes the institutional differences and outputs between several types of prisons services in the

Netherlands, particularly concerning their accountability and performance. We find no differences

Received: 5 February 2017 Revised: 16 January 2018 Accepted: 18 January 2018

DOI: 10.1002/nml.21306

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